The girl faced around on him almost fiercely.

“No, you could not be so bad as that!  To have felt the morning kiss of another woman, to have watched her good-night smile, and then to have come to me—­that would have been too base, too degrading—­I should have hated you because I despised you.  I should have loathed you instead——­”

“Of loving me!  Be honest and true, little Jean—­you do care.”

“Yes, I have cared.”

“And do still?”

“Yes.”

Her tone was as cold and as clear as the sound of an icicle striking the frozen earth in the fall.  It angered him, and his voice shook roughly.

“A man who binds up his life in the love of a woman is a fool!  Because she is all the world to him, all he works to receive praise from, all he fears in the blaming, he thinks her capable of as much love as himself.  And even as he watches, he sees her pass from fervor into apathy.  Her affection is but the dry husks of what he hoped to find.  You never cared!”

“Grant,” she said, earnestly, “you have told me to be honest.  I will be.  I think”—­with a little laugh—­“that if I had been a man I should not have been a coward.  I shall not be now.  You wrong me and yourself when you say that I never cared.  It is because my caring has been so much a part of myself that I have never been able to stand aloof and look and comment upon it.  It was just me.  When I lived, it lived; when I die——­”

“My love!”

“When—­no.  I do not believe it can die even then!  I think it is a part of my soul, and will outstand all time.”

She hesitated as if devising words to express herself with even more sweet abandon.  There was a certain loving recklessness in what she uttered now: 

“Not care?  I wish you, too, would understand!  Perhaps it is because we care in such different ways.  I don’t know, but to me it has been all!  There is no joy, no pleasure, however petty, through all the day, but it brings with it the swift desire to share it with you.  Every morning I waken with your half-uttered name on my lips, as though, when I slipped hack through the portals of consciousness into the world of reality, I came only to find you, as a timid child awakes and calls feebly for its mother.  Once, not long ago, in a street accident, such as you know of in our busy city, I seemed very close to death, and in an instant my spirit seemed to have overleaped the peril and the terrible scene, and was with you.  Afterward, one who sat near me said that, while some screamed or prayed, I said only ‘Grant,’ and he asked, lightly, now that danger was over:  ’Is the great general your patron saint?’ And I—­I did not know that I had said it, since the name can never be as near to my lips as it is to my heart.”

Harlson did not reply.  He could not then.  His head was bent.

“And when you were ill—­ah! then it was the hardest of all!  I dreamed of the little things I could do for you—­how your dear head could rest on my shoulders, and it might help to ease the pain; how I could save you from annoyances; how I could—­love you!”