Certainly he could not have been freer, for she never questioned him; and, if she was ever uneasy or jealous when he came in late--for him--without telling her where he had been, she never showed it. She had no friends, and he often wondered how she passed the time when he was not with her. Whenever he inquired he got the same answer: She had been busying herself with their home; she had been planning to save money or to make him more comfortable; she had been reading to improve her mind and to enable herself to start him talking on subjects that interested him.
No matter how unexpectedly he looked in upon her life or her mind, he found--himself.
One day she said to him--it was after two years of this life: “Something is worrying you. Is it about me? You look at me so queerly at times.”
“Yes,” he answered. “It is about you. Tell me, Miss Black-Hair, do you never think of getting old?”
“No,” she smiled. “I shall wait until I am twenty-five before I begin to think of that.”
“But don’t you see that this sort of thing must stop sometime? It is unjust to you. When I think of it, I reproach myself for permitting us to get into it.”
“I am happy,” she said, looking straight at him, terror in her eyes.
“Who has? And what do I want with friends?”
“But don’t you see, I can’t introduce you to anybody. I can’t talk about you to the people I know. I am always having to explain you away, always having to act as if I were ashamed of this, my real life. At times I am Anglo-Saxon enough to be really ashamed of it. And I ought to be and am ashamed of myself.”
“Don’t let’s talk about it. You and I understand. Why should we bother about the rest of the world?”
“No, we _must_ talk about it. I have been going over it carefully. We must--must be married.”
He laid his hand upon hers. She blushed deeply and lowered her head. A tear dropped upon the front of her gown and hung glittering in the meshes of the white lace. She crept into his arms and buried her face upon his shoulder and sobbed. He had never seen her even look like tears before.
“We must be married,” he repeated, patting her on the shoulder.
“Yes,” he said firmly, mentally noting that this was the very first time he had ever caught her in a pretense.