"You were her comfort when you least thought it," said Lois.
"Perhaps. I've always hoped so, in my saner moments. We stumbled along from day to day, and slept out at night, always trying to keep away from people, when—she thought we were going home, and that they would prevent me." He stopped for a moment, and then went on, driven by that Ancient Mariner spirit which makes people, once they have touched on a forbidden subject, probe it to its haunting depths. "Did Cater tell you how she died? She died in a barn. My mother! She used to hold me in her arms at night, and make me rest my head against her bosom when I was tired; and I didn't even have a pillow for her when she was dying! It's one of those things you can never make up for—that you can never change, no matter how you live, no matter what you do. It comes back to you when you least expect it."
Both were silent for a while before Lois murmured: "But the pain ended in happiness and peace for her. It would hurt her more than anything to know that you grieved."
"Yes, I believe that," he acquiesced simply. "I'm glad you said it now. I couldn't rest until I got money enough to take her out of her pauper grave and lay her by the side of her own people at home."
"And you have had a pretty hard time."
"Oh, that's nothing!" He squared his shoulders with unconscious rebuttal of sympathy. "When I was a kid, perhaps—but I get a lot of pleasure out of life."
"But you must be lonely without any one belonging to you," said Lois, trying to grope her way into the labyrinth. "Wouldn't you be happier if you were married?"
He laughed involuntarily and shook his head, with a slight flush that seemed to come from the embarrassment of some secret thought. The action, and the change of expression, made him singularly charming. "Possibly; but the chance of that is small. Women—that is, unmarried women—don't care for my society."
"Oh, oh!" protested Lois, with quick knowledge, as she looked at him, of how much the reverse the truth must be. "But if you found the right woman you might make her care for you."
He shook his head, with a sudden gleam in his gray eyes. "No; there you're wrong. I'd never make any woman care for me, because I'd never want to. If she couldn't care for me without my making her—! I'd have to know, when I first looked at her, that she was mine. And if she were not, if she did not care for me herself, I'd never want to make her—never!"