Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/500

 old woman who certainly had the ignorant old woman's appetite for scandal? You probably didn't even get straight what really happened then—it sounds fearfully mixed up, you know, as though there must be more than that to it. Let alone its real meaning, its human meaning, that you couldn't possibly have understood at fourteen, if you had known all the facts—and there certainly were lots more facts than what you saw and what that old woman put into your head.

"And, anyhow—oh, Marise, no matter what it was, it has nothing to do with your life now! Why do you let it mean so much to you? Just think how long ago it happened! It hasn't a thing to do with you. How can it?"

She flushed a deep, shamed red, and asked in a whisper, "You don't think that I … that I would be like that?"

He cried out furiously, "No, no, no! What an idea! It's nothing to you—nothing, I tell you. It's been nothing to you for years. You ought to have stopped thinking of it ever so long ago. Everybody starts all over again. You're yourself. You don't have to keep carrying that around with you. It doesn't belong to you. Let it fall. Leave it here!" he commanded abruptly, springing to his feet and holding out his hand to help her rise. "Leave it here! And walk off into your own life."

She stood up beside him now, so giddy with a strange new lightness that she laid her hand on his arm to steady herself. At her touch he flushed hot with the desire to put his arms about her and hold her passionately close. The desire was so intense that he had for an instant the hallucination that he had done it, that she leaned her head against his breast. But he had been so harrowed by sympathy for her poor bruised heart, had been so touched by the revelation of the delicacy and fineness of fiber which had but served to deepen the dreadful, unhealed hurt with which she had lived helplessly, he was so moved by her white, drawn face, lifted to his own with a childlike faith in what he said, he was so wrung with his thankfulness to see on that pale face a sensitive reflection of his own certainty … oh, now was no time to burst out on her with the flame of his passion, now