When, at last, Traill
knocked upon the door, she could turn with brave assurance and bid
him enter. He came in with questioning eyes that lost their
querulousness the moment they had found her face.
"You're better?" he said at once.
"Yes." She smiled reassuringly. "I'm absolutely all right now."
He looked at her eyes, red with weeping. He knew she had been
crying--had heard her sobs from the other room. Part of her secret
then, at least, he had realized. She was fond of him. How fond, it
would be more or less impossible to divine; but it must be nipped
there--strangled utterly--if he were to fulfil her expectations of
him. What it was that pressed him to the sacrifice, he could not
actually say; unless it were that it appealed to his better nature
as a thing of shame to do otherwise. She would marry him, he felt
sure of that. But marriage, with all its accompanying conventions
and indissoluble bonds--indissoluble, except through the loathsome
medium of the divorce court--was a condition of life that his whole
nature shrank from. He refused it utterly. This girl--this little
child--perhaps saw no other termination to their acquaintance than
that of marriage, and either this thought had become a brake upon
his desire, or he wished, in the honesty of his heart, to treat her
well; whatever it was, there was not that in his mind which made him
determine to be the one to teach her otherwise.
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