"This is a hard position for me," she said, after a pause, "and all I can promise you is this: I love Sylvia, and I am going to do whatever I think will be of the greatest advantage to her."
"Then," I asserted with continued earnestness, "it shall be my labor to prove that to love the man who loves her as I do will be her greatest good! If I do that, will you be on my side?"
She smiled, looked at me a few moments, and then answered, "Yes."
"Your hand upon it!" I cried, leaning still farther forward. She laughed at the enthusiastic warmth of my manner, and gave me her hand.
"It is a promise!" I exclaimed, and was about to raise her fingers to my lips when she quickly drew them away.
"I declare," she said, rising as she spoke, "I did not suppose that you would forget that I am the Mother Superior of the House of Martha."
"Excuse me," I replied, "but you are not that; with your own mouth you have assured me that you are an Interpolation, and there is nothing in a social or moral law which forbids a suitable expression of gratitude to an Interpolation."
"Sir," said she, "I think I have seen quite as much as is necessary of the view which you asked me here to look upon."
In the half hour during which I remained alone upon the bluff, awaiting the return of Walkirk and the fishing party, I thought as much of the lady with whom I had been talking as the lady of whom I had been talking.
"How is it possible," I asked myself, "that this gentlewoman, warm with her rich blooded beauty, alive with ripe youth, born to delight the soul of man and fire his heart, should content herself to be a head nurse in a hospital; to wander in an unsightly disguise among dismal sick-beds; to direct the management of measles-refuges; to shut herself up in a bare-floored, cold-walled institution with narrow-minded Sister Sarahs; to be, in a word, the Mother Superior of the House of Martha?"
That she should occupy this position seemed to me a crime. There were many women in the world who could do all she was doing, but there were few who could take her place in the world of full, true life.
When the fishing party returned, I went to the house to take leave of our new friends.
"You must go?" said the Sand Lady. "And where, may I ask, is it imperative that you should go?"