"It is nothing," he answered. "I wanted to be busy."
"I heard the ringing of the anvil when I waked, and knew what it meant. Yes, you are wonderful, and I am afraid"—she tried to smile—"that you are too valuable for us. I was thinking about you on my way to town last night. You won't stay here. You can't stand this sort of thing—I mean the awful mess you find us in. I wouldn't blame you for leaving us. Why, I'll be frank with you, Mr. Brown—it is only fair to you as a stranger in this locality. There are plantations only a few miles away where you would find more people employed, where they have some sort of amusement, and where the people you'd work for would not be upset and depressed as we are. I did want to save our crops, now that they are planted, but, facing this other thing, the crops count for nothing—nothing at all. If God would show me a way to save my brothers I'd give my very soul in payment. You don't know—no one could know how I feel. I am stretched on a cross, Mr. Brown. I am praying with every breath I draw, but I am stifling under the dread of what may happen. At this very minute Tobe Keith may—may—" she groaned, leaned against the bellows and stood shuddering, cowed and wild-eyed, under the horror her mind had pictured.
"Don't, don't, please don't!" he cried. "Don't give up. Don't lose hope. There is always hope. I lost it once in—in a great trouble, but I lived through it somehow. You will, too. Some wise man has said that God does not lay any burden on any one that is too heavy to bear. Think of that—believe that; it comforted me once. It is comforting me now in the belief that you will escape from this terrible thing."
"Oh, do you think so—do you?" and she wrung her hands, lowered her head again, and uttered a little wail that ended in a sob.
He all but reached out his hands toward her in a strange, bold impulse to take her into his arms, but checked himself and stood aghast as he contemplated the catastrophe which might have followed such an unwarranted act. Had he subconsciously leaped back to the free period before his downfall, or, as a regenerated man, had he for an instant felt himself to be on her level? Ah no, it was the kinship again—the kinship of suffering souls.
"I'm sure of it," he repeated. "If I thought otherwise I'd see no good in life at all. Men deserve punishment for the wrong they do, but gentle girls like you must not suffer for the mistakes of men. It will pass over—your cloud will blow away."
"Oh, oh!" and she put her hands to her dry eyes while her shoulders shook. "I hope—you make me hope a little, somehow—that what you say may be true. You comfort me more than everybody else put together. It is your way, your voice, your look. You are a good, kind man, Mr. Brown. How strange that you came just when you did! I'll try to be braver. I'll try to stop thinking that every approaching person on the road is coming to tell me the worst."
"That is right," he said.
"And would you pray—would you continue to pray?" she asked, with the timid simplicity of a child groping in the dark.
Their eyes met steadily. "I don't know how to advise you as to that," he said, after a pause full of thought. "I must confess that I am not religious. I used to pray, as a child, but I don't now."