"You see, maybe you have heard something about Mamsey and me, but you did not quite understand and you felt you had a right to look as you did. I wonder why men want to make it harder for—for women, when women try to forget?"
Norval winced; the shaft had sunk into its rightful place.
And still the white-faced girl stood her distance, and tried to smile.
"I am going to tell you all about Mamsey and me," she said. "I will tell you as we walk along."
How little she really knew of life! But how the last year of suffering and renunciation had filled the void with a young but terrible philosophy. Norval did not speak. With bowed head, hands clasped behind him, he walked beside Donelle as she went along, bearing her cross and poor Jo’s.
"You see I could not let Mamsey know that I knew. I could not hurt her so. She would have made me go away, and always I would have remembered her here alone where my father left her. And Tom Gavot has helped me keep the people still. He stays here, and he wanted to go way, way off, and be something so different. That is why I can play for Tom in his cabin. He knows and understands; he couldn’t hurt Mamsey and me, he couldn’t! Women like Mamsey and me feel a hurt terribly, that’s why I am telling you this, I want you to be kind. Don’t make things harder, they are bad enough!"
The words were wrung from Norval, but he did not look up.
"I’m sure now that you know, you never will hurt us again," Donelle’s voice soothed and caressed unconsciously. "I!—I wanted to be happy just as if nothing had happened, before I was born, to keep me from being happy. I thought about love, just as girls will. They cannot help it. Then you came and I wanted you!"
A quivering fierceness shot through the words. Norval gave a quick glance at the face near him and saw that the purest, most primitive statement of a mighty truth held the girl’s thought. If she had said, she, the first woman, to him, the first man:
"You are mine, I want you," she could not have said it more divinely.
"I wanted to make you happy; to play for you while you painted your beautiful pictures, and then when you were tired and I was tired, why, our big love would bring us more and more happiness. Then, well, then you looked at me through Tom Gavot’s window and somehow I understood!"