Miller's face worked. “I'll ask your pardon for that, Jeff. You've been the best friend she has. Well, we've thrashed it all out. She fought her mother and me two days; didn't think it right to let me give my name to her, even though she admits she has come to care for me. You can see how she would be torn two ways. It's the only road out for her and the baby that is on the way, but she couldn't bring herself to sacrifice me, as she calls it. I've hammered and hammered at her that it's no sacrifice. She can't see it; just cries and cries.”
“Of course she would be unusually sensitive; Her nerves must be all bare so that she shrinks as one does when a wound is touched.”
“That's it. She keeps speaking of herself as if she were a lost soul. At last we fairly wore her out. After we are married her mother and she will take the eight o'clock for Kenton. Nobody there knows them, and she'll have a chance to forget.”
“You're a white man, Sam,” Jeff nodded lightly. But his eyes were shining.
“I'm the man that loves her. I couldn't do less, could I?”
“Some men would do a good deal less.”
“Not if they looked at it the way I do. She's the same Nellie I've always known. What difference does it make to me that she stumbled in the dark and hurt herself—except that my heart is so much more tender to her it aches?”
“If you hold to that belief she'll live to see the day when she is a happy woman again,” the journalist prophesied.
“I'm going to teach her to think of it all as only a bad nightmare she's been through.” His jaw clinched again so that the muscles stood out on his cheeks. “Do you know she won't say a word—not even to her mother—about who the villain is that betrayed her? I'd wring his coward neck off for him,” he finished with a savage oath.
“Better the way it is, Sam. Let her keep her secret.. The least said and thought about it the better.”