“Is it true? How strange!” said Mrs. Farrell. “And if I had always been very cold and reserved and stiff with you, and not come back after that book, and not let you take a hairpin out of my chignon, and not made mischief between you and your friend, and not been so ready to walk and ride with you in season and out of season, and not rather—well!—cut up with you to-day about that handkerchief, would you have loved me all the same?”
She was still looking very seriously into his face, so very seriously that he could not help the smile that the contrast of her words and mien brought to his lips.
“Don’t! Don’t laugh!” she pleaded piteously. “I’m trying to get at something.”
“But there is nothing, nothing for you to get at!” he cried out. “If I tried forever, I could only say at last that I love you.”
“Yes, but you oughtn’t to,” said Mrs. Farrell, with a sigh. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know who or what I am.” She restrained a movement of impatience on his part. “I’m not at all like other people. My father was nothing but a ship’s captain, and he had been a common sailor; and he ran off with my mother, I’ve heard, and they were married against her parents’ will. I can remember how handsome he was, with blue eyes and a yellow beard, and how he used to swear at the men—I went a voyage with him once after my mother died. I was brought up at a convent school in Canada, along with the half sisters of Mr. Farrell, who owned my father’s ship; and when I came out he married me. I didn’t love him; no, I never pretended to; he was too old. But I married him, and I would have been a good enough wife, I believe, but he died; he died very soon after we were married. I never said so, but I was sorry that he should die, for he was very good to me; and yet I was glad to be free again. There, Mr. Easton, that’s all about me.”
Apparently this history had not given his passion the pause of a single pulse. She was all that she had been to him, or more; his face showed that.
“Well?” she asked, triumphantly.
“Then you don’t forbid me to love you?” he questioned in turn.
“Oh, I ought to! You are too generous and too good for me! No, no, you mustn’t love me. I should be sure to bring harm upon you. It was all true about Mr. Farrell, but it wasn’t about my father. In his last years he joined the church, and he used to pray in the cabin to be forgiven for swearing on deck. So I’m not so bad as I said, but I’m not good enough for you to love.”
“Won’t you let me judge of that?” asked Easton, with a smile, too happy to do else, whatever name she had given herself. He crouched again at her feet, near the base of the flat rock on which she had sunk, and while he spoke she looked beamingly upon him. “I could parade a few defects of my own,” he said, “but just now I am anxious to have you think all the good of me that you can; I shall be infinitely far from good enough.”