“The slavery was love’s slavery.  It was just my love for you that made you swallow up all my days.  You did not force yourself into my thoughts.  You crept in, always, and you were there always—­how much, you will never know.

“But as time went by, Aunt Mildred and Uncle grew to dislike you.  They grew afraid.  What was to become of me?  You were destroying my life.  My music?  You know how my dream of it has dimmed away.  That spring, when I first met you—­I was twenty, and I was about to start for Germany.  I was going to study hard.  That was four years ago, and I am still here in California.

“I had other lovers.  You drove them away—­No! no!  I don’t mean that.  It was I that drove them away.  What did I care for lovers, for anything, when you were near?  But as I said, Aunt Mildred and Uncle grew afraid.  There has been talk—­friends, busybodies, and all the rest.  The time went by.  You did not speak.  I could only wonder, wonder.  I knew you loved me.  Much was said against you by Uncle at first, and then by Aunt Mildred.  They were father and mother to me, you know.  I could not defend you.  Yet I was loyal to you.  I refused to discuss you.  I closed up.  There was half-estrangement in my home—­Uncle Robert with a face like an undertaker, and Aunt Mildred’s heart breaking.  But what could I do, Chris?  What could I do?”

The man, his head resting on her knee again, groaned, but made no other reply.

“Aunt Mildred was mother to me, yet I went to her no more with my confidences.  My childhood’s book was closed.  It was a sweet book, Chris. The tears come into my eyes sometimes when I think of it.  But never mind that.  Great happiness has been mine as well.  I am glad I can talk frankly of my love for you.  And the attaining of such frankness has been very sweet.  I do love you, Chris. I love you . . .  I cannot tell you how.  You are everything to me, and more besides.  You remember that Christmas tree of the children?—­when we played blindman’s buff? and you caught me by the arm so, with such a clutching of fingers that I cried out with the hurt?  I never told you, but the arm was badly bruised.  And such sweet I got of it you could never guess.  There, black and blue, was the imprint of your fingers—­your fingers, Chris, your fingers.  It was the touch of you made visible.  It was there a week, and I kissed the marks—­oh, so often!  I hated to see them go; I wanted to rebruise the arm and make them linger.  I was jealous of the returning white that drove the bruise away.  Somehow,—­oh!  I cannot explain, but I loved you so!”

In the silence that fell, she continued her caressing of his hair, while she idly watched a great gray squirrel, boisterous and hilarious, as it scampered back and forth in a distant vista of the redwoods.  A crimson-crested woodpecker, energetically drilling a fallen trunk, caught and transferred her gaze.  The man did not lift his head.  Rather, he crushed his face closer against her knee, while his heaving shoulders marked the hardness with which he breathed.