"Because your mother--loved you."
Again dead silence. Hare did not look at her. His hand clenched the arm
of his chair. His face was white. Then, very low, "Why do you--make it
hard for me?"
"Because I want--the book"; she was smiling at him with her eyes like
stars. "I want to read it with the eyes of the little boy--with the eyes
of the little boy who looked into the future and saw life as a great
adventure; who looked into the future--and dreamed."
He had a vision, too, of that little boy, reading, in the old house in
the Maine woods, by the light of an oil-lamp, on Christmas Eve, with the
snow blowing outside as it blew to-night.
"And your mother loved you because she loved your father," the girl's
voice went on, "and you were all very happy up there in the forest. Do
you remember that you told me about it on the ship?--you were happy,
although you were poor, and hadn't any books but 'Treasure Island' and
'Huckleberry Finn.' But your mother was happy--because she--loved your
father."
As she repeated it, she leaned forward. "Could you think of your mother
as having been happy with any one else but your father?" she asked.
"Could you think of her as having never married him, of having gone
through the rest of her days a half-woman, because he would not--take
her--into his life? Can you think that all the money in the world--all
the money in the whole world--would--would have made up--"
The room seemed to darken. Hare was conscious that her face was hidden
in her hands, that he stumbled toward her, that he knelt beside
her--that she was in his arms.
"Hush," he was saying in that beating darkness of emotion. "Hush, don't
cry--I--I will never let you go--"
When the storm had spent itself and when at last she met his long gaze,
he whispered, "I'm not sure now that it is right--"
"You will be sure as the years go on," she whispered back; then,
tremulously: "but I--I could never have--talked that way if I had
thought of you as the man. I had to think of you as the little boy--who
dreamed."