“If you really loved me,” David had said hotly, “you would not let anyone or anything come between us.”
She told him that she could not go to him over the bodies of a sick father and a helpless child. And since he had asked this of her, she did not, indeed, love him.
After this stormy scene—the last between them, since David Whitcomb had gone away, no one knew whither, nor indeed cared, since he was young and friendless and poor—Barbara had cried herself to sleep for many successive nights, quietly, so as not to disturb the sleeping child. But one does not weep overlong at night whose brain and hands and feet are employed in the daytime. Only the beggared rich may give themselves to the indolent luxury of grief. After many nights of weeping followed by days of anxiety and uncounted labors, the pain of that parting subsided to a dull aching memory, which wakened once to cry out bitterly when she heard that he had been seen on a ship bound to the Yukon region in the early days of the gold fever. Many perished along the trail that year. It was rumored that David Whitcomb was among the number. No word ever came back to contradict the rumor, which after the lapse of months was accepted as a fact, and so—forgotten.
It was a long time—as youth measures time—since she had thought of David Whitcomb. Now she deliberately travelled back over the years between, and stood looking at her anguished young self, torn between love and duty, and at her one lover, who was not noble enough—she saw this with mournful certainty now—to help her lift and carry her heavy burden. Nevertheless she forgave him—as she had done hundreds of times in the past, excusing him tenderly, as a mother might have done, for his hot young selfishness, which refused to share her heart with a dying man and a helpless little child.
“I am glad,” she said aloud to the shadowy presence of her one lover, “glad that I did not yield.”
But her face was grave and sorrowful as she rose to answer a gentle knock at the kitchen door.
Peg Morrison stood there under the shelter of an ancient green umbrella, his puckered face smiling and healthily pink against the pale green of the outside world.
“I lef’ the Cap’n a-studyin’ over his book,” he chuckled, as he stepped into the kitchen, carefully wiping his feet on the braided rug inside. “He takes to vallable info’mation as the sparks fly upwards, an’ I’m glad to see it. Thinks I, as I looked at him settin’ down improvin’ maxims in red ink, this is a good time to talk over the situation with Miss Barb’ry.”