"I'm afraid you are right; but I believed that I might make a success of this farming venture."
"Dare you believe that would have mattered so very much to me? Do you think I didn't know why you turned farmer, and why you have since then done things that none of your neighbors would have been capable of?"
"It seemed necessary," explained Thorne, still with the same expressive quietness. "I did so because I wanted you, and that is exactly what makes defeat so bitter now."
"And you imagined that you had hidden your motive? Can you believe that a man could change his whole mode of life and take up a burden he had carefully avoided, as you have done, without having the woman on whose account he did it understand why? Are we so blind or utterly foolish? Don't you know that our perceptions and intuitions are twice as keen as yours?"
"Then you understood what my object was all along--and it didn't strike you as absurd and impossible?"
"Why should it seem absurd that I should love you, Mavy?"
He came no nearer, but stood still, looking at her with elation and trouble curiously mingled in his face, and she realized that the fight was but half won. He had of late sloughed off his wayward carelessness and she knew that there had always been a depth of resolute character beneath it. He was a man who would do what he felt was the fitting thing, even though it hurt him.
"Well," he said, speaking slowly in a tense voice, "ever since I first saw you I longed that this should come about. It was what I worked for, and nothing would have been too hard that brought me nearer you, but it's almost a cruelty that I should have succeeded--now."
"Why?" asked Alison, bracing herself for another effort, for the strain was beginning to tell. "Is what you have won of no value to you?"
Thorne spread out his hands as if in desperation.
"It is because it is so precious that I shrink from involving you in the disaster that is hanging over me. I am a ruined, discredited man, and in a few more weeks I will be driven out of my homestead without a dollar. It will be three or four years at least before I can struggle to my feet again."
"Is that so very dreadful, Mavy?" Alison smiled. "I almost think that in the things that count the most many of you are, after all, more bound by traditions than we are. Your wildest flight was the driving about the prairie with a load of patent medicines, and now your imagination is bounded by a homestead and household comforts. You could teach a woman to love you, and then go away, driven by some fantastic point of honor, because you could not realize that her views might be wider than yours."