"
"I couldn't bear it any longer," she said brokenly. "I'm not made of
steel or stone. It's been terrible. He doesn't speak to me except to
order me to do this or that. I haven't done anything wrong, and I won't
be treated so. I won't! When he made me kneel down by him in the trail
and tried to make me pray to be forgiven of my sins, I couldn't stand it.
I don't know what my sins are, and I won't be converted if I don't want
to. I'm not a slave. I'm of age. I'm twenty."
There was no sign of fatigue now in the Young Doctor's face. Something
had called him out of himself, and this human need had done what a wife's
hand might have done, or the welcome of a child.
"No, you're not twenty," he declared, with a friendly smile. "You aren't
ten. You are only one. In fact, I think you're only just born!"
He did not speak as lightly as the words read. In his voice there was
that compassionate irony with which men shield those for whom they care.
It means protection and defence. Somehow she seemed to him like a small
bird on its first flight from the nest, or, as Patsy Kernaghan would have
said, "a tame lamb loose in a zoolyogical gardin."
"So because you won't pray and can't bear it any longer, you run away
from him, and come to me!" the other remarked with a sorry smile, pouring
out a glass of wine from a decanter that stood on the table.
"Drink this," he said presently, pushing her down gently into a chair
with one hand and holding the glass to her lips.
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