“It makes me want to work for you.”
Bellair placed her saying to the account of her fine zeal for the good of the nearest. He was very far from seeing anything heroic in his part of the ten days.... They had paused on the little hill back of the settlement where she had lived. With all her coming home, she met no acquaintance while he was with her. It was as if she had come to look, not to enter.... But there were two days in which she went forward alone, and Bellair got a foretaste of what it would mean to be separated. It called to him all the strength that he had earned.... The Faraway Woman came back to Hamilton where he waited—as one who had hastened. The child was asleep, and they walked out into the streets together....
They were alone again as in that first night on board the Fomalhaut when Fleury left them.
“Do you want to stay to make your house near the Hamilton road?” he asked.
She regarded him quietly, her eyes fixed upon his face with an incommunicable yearning.
“No.”
“Do you mean to stay in New Zealand?”
Again she held him with her eyes, before answering:
“It may be well for me here, as anywhere. I could not stay in America.”
The sun was setting. It was she who broke the silence: