“Where have you come from?”
“A long way—a very long way,” replied the woman without uncovering her face.
“Why have you come back here?” His voice was dull and level and hard, and his face might have been cut out of stone, for any changing expression it wore. “You chose your own path; why have you abandoned it?”
She was weeping so bitterly that for a time she could not answer his question. At last she turned her face fully to him, a young and rather pretty face, but haggard and wild with weeping and with sorrow; he looked at it unmoved.
“I have been seeking for you a long time,” she said at last, in a voice scarcely above a whisper. “There has been a hunger here”—she struck herself relentlessly on the breast—“greater than I could bear. I could not sleep; I have even prayed to die. I want to see—to see the child!”
The man raised his arm fiercely, as though to ward off her approach, and took a step backward. “No!” he cried, almost in a shout.
“I ask nothing else,” she pleaded. “If anything could have held me true to the old life—if anything could have bent me to your will, and starved the soul out of me, it would have been the child. I tell you something has gone out of me here”—she struck herself again—“and I shall die if I can not hold her in my arms again. You are a man; you do not understand. You can find it in your heart to laugh at me, because I was able to leave her; but she is flesh of my flesh, and I can not tear her from me. Let me see her; let me know that she is well; let me see her smile into my eyes again; let me kiss her! Man, hear the rain and the wind; I have come through them these many weary miles, and I will go through them again. Let me see her, if only for a few minutes, and I swear to you, by the God that gave her to me, that I will go away, and trouble you no more! Only let me ease my hunger.” She was down on her knees at his feet, stretching out her hands to clasp them; he backed away to avoid her.
“You did not think of all this before,” he said, slowly. “Where is the man?”