“It's no sin! I was as innocent as the babe unborn when I married Laban—as innocent as he was, poor boy, when he would have me; and we all thought he was dead. Oh, why couldn't he have been dead?”
“This is murder you have in your heart now, Nancy,” the old man said, with who knows what awful pleasure in his casuistry, so pitilessly unerring. “If the life of that wicked man could buy you safety in your sin you could wish it taken.”
“Oh, oh, oh! What shall I do, what shall I do.” She wailed out the words with her head fallen forward on her knees, and her loose hair dripping over them.
“Do? Go home, and bring your little one, and come to me. I will deal with Laban when he gets back tonight.”
She started erect. “And let him think I've left him? And the neighbors, let them think we've quarreled, and I couldn't live with him?”
“It won't matter what the world thinks,” Gillespie said, and he spoke of the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its judgments supremely dreaded. “Besides,” he faltered, “no one is knowing but ourselves to his coming back. It can seem as if he left you.”
“And I live such a lie as that? Is this you, David?”
It was she who rose highest now, as literally she did, in standing on the stone where she had crouched, above the level of his footing.
“I—I say it to spare you, Nancy. I don't wish it. But I wish to make it easy—or a little bit easier—something you can bear better.”
“Oh, I know, David, I know! You would save me if you could. But maybe—maybe it ain't what we think it is. Maybe he was outlawed by staying away so long?”