“He said it was living in sin for us to keep together if he was alive.”
Laban pondered it. “I reckon if we come together without knowing he was alive, it ain't no sin.”
“Yes, it is!” she shrieked.
“We was married just like anybody; we didn't make no secret of it; we've lived together four years. Are you goin' to unlive them years by stoppin' now?”
“Don't you s'pose I been over all that a million times? My mind's sore workin' with it; there ain't a thought in me that don't ache from it. But David's right. We've got to part. I put your things in this poke here,” she said, and she gave him a bag made from an old pillow tick, with a few clothes lumping it half full. “I'll carry the baby, Laban.” She pulled back from him with the child in her arms. “Or no, you can carry her; you'll have to leave her, too, and you've got a right to all the good you can get of her now. Don't touch anything. I'll stay at David's, tonight, but I'll come back in the morning, and then I'll see what I'll do—stay, or go and live with David. Come!”
“And what about Joey?” Laban asked, half turning with the child when they were outside.
“I declare I forgot about Joey! I'll see, to-morrow. It seems as if my very soul was tired now.
“Joey will just think we've gone over to David's for a minute; he'll go to bed when he comes; he'll have had his supper at Peter Hingston's, anyway.”
As they walked away, she said, “You're a good man, Laban Billings, to feel the way you always do about Joey. You've been a true father to him; I wonder what his own father'd have been.”
“No truer father to him than I've been a husband to you, Nancy,” the man said, and as they walked along together, so far apart, his speech came to him, and he began to plead their case with her as before an adverse judge. Worn as she was with the arguments for and against them after the long day of iteration, she could not refuse to let him plead. She scarcely answered him, but he knew when they reached Gillespie's cabin that she had seen them in the fierce light of her conscience, where there was no shadow of turning.