“I couldn't do it, Mr. Schwitter. I guess I'm a coward. Maybe I'll be sorry.”
“What's that to do with the right and wrong of it?”
“Maybe I'm queer. It don't seem like wrongdoing to me. It seems to me that the Lord would make an exception of us if He knew the circumstances. Perhaps, after you get used to the idea--What I thought was like this. I've got a little farm about seven miles from the city limits, and the tenant on it says that nearly every Sunday somebody motors out from town and wants a chicken-and-waffle supper. There ain't much in the nursery business anymore. These landscape fellows buy their stuff direct, and the middleman's out. I've got a good orchard, and there's a spring, so I could put running water in the house. I'd be good to you, Tillie,--I swear it. It'd be just the same as marriage. Nobody need know it.”
“You'd know it. You wouldn't respect me.”
“Don't a man respect a woman that's got courage enough to give up everything for him?”
Tillie was crying softly into her apron. He put a work-hardened hand on her head.
“It isn't as if I'd run around after women,” he said. “You're the only one, since Maggie--” He drew a long breath. “I'll give you time to think it over. Suppose I stop in to-morrow morning. It doesn't commit you to anything to talk it over.”
There had been no passion in the interview, and there was none in the touch of his hand. He was not young, and the tragic loneliness of approaching old age confronted him. He was trying to solve his problem and Tillie's, and what he had found was no solution, but a compromise.
“To-morrow morning, then,” he said quietly, and went out the door.
All that hot August morning Tillie worked in a daze. Mrs. McKee watched her and said nothing. She interpreted the girl's white face and set lips as the result of having had to dismiss Schwitter again, and looked for time to bring peace, as it had done before.
Le Moyne came late to his midday meal. For once, the mental anaesthesia of endless figures had failed him. On his way home he had drawn his small savings from the bank, and mailed them, in cash and registered, to a back street in the slums of a distant city. He had done this before, and always with a feeling of exaltation, as if, for a time at least, the burden he carried was lightened. But to-day he experienced no compensatory relief. Life was dull and stale to him, effort ineffectual. At thirty a man should look back with tenderness, forward with hope. K. Le Moyne dared not look back, and had no desire to look ahead into empty years.