Nancy groped vainly for the faintest suggestion of an answer, but she could find no word to say. She sat mutely and helplessly on the edge of her uncomfortable chair.
"Were you hiding anything from me?" the man pursued.
"I don't know how to tell my reasons," said Nancy finally.
"Ah, Nancy, you are a mystery to me. I don't understand a tenth of you. I feel as though I had lost you. Did you want to be married?"
The question was like an appeal for reassurance on the part of her father, as if he wanted some support from the girl to resist his own doubts. Nancy did her gallant best to comfort him.
"Yes," she replied.
"I wish I could believe you," he sighed, only half convinced.
The ten days with his children away, his unexpected fortitude in denying to his nerves Kuei-lien's lethal comfort, had been a sacrifice he would have been wiser never to have made. There had been too much time to think. And Herrick had reached the state of body where thought was a uselessly distracting exertion. So long as his will shirked the strain of mending what was not past cure, Nancy's marriage, which had seemed such a reasonable match when it was four safe years away, had become a sinister dream he could not thrust from him. The sight of Nancy in her Western clothes made the pain unbearable. He tried to convince himself that he was not offering her up on the altar of his folly.
"Do you really want to be married?" he asked next, not content with her previous answer. "Do you understand what it means? You are so young. Time goes so fast."
"And if I don't want to be married," asked the girl, with a look of curious insight into the hesitations of his heart, "if I don't want to be married, will it make any difference?"