“But without marriage,” she hesitated, “the home—­”

“It is the old question,” I said.  “The home is built on woman’s virtue; but virtue is not the same where there is no tome, no property, where there is no society—­it is an artificial thing, born of compromise, and grown stronger by custom of the ages of property-owning man.”

I saw a horror come across her eyes.

“What do you say to me, John Cowles?  That what a woman prizes is not right, is not good?  No, that I shall not think!” She drew apart from me.

“Because you think just as you do, I love you,” I said.

“Yet you say so many things.  I have taken life as it came, just as other girls do, not thinking.  It is not nice, it is not clean, that girls should study over these things.  That is not right.”

“No, that is not right,” said I, dully.

“Then tell me, what is marriage—­that one thing a girl dreams of all her life.  Is it of the church?”

“It is not of the church,” I said.

“Then it is the law.”

“It is not the law,” I said.

“Then what is it?” she asked.  “John Cowles, tell me, what makes a wedding between two who really and truly love.  Can marriage be of but two?”

“Yes,” said I.

“But there must be witnesses—­there must be ceremony—­else there is no marriage,” she went on.  Her woman’s brain clung to the safe, sane groove which alone can guide progress and civilization and society—­that great, cruel, kind, imperative compromise of marriage, without which all the advancement of the world would be as naught.  I loved her for it.  But for me, I say I had gone savage.  I was at the beginning of all this, whereas it remained with her as she had left it.

“Witnesses?” I said.  “Look at those!” I pointed to the mountains.  “Marriages, many of them, have been made with no better witnesses than those.”

My heart stopped when I saw how far she had jumped to her next speech.

“Then we two are all the people left in the world, John Cowles?  When I am old, will you cast me off?  When another woman comes into this valley, when I am bent and old, and cannot see, will you cast me off, and, being stronger than I am, will you go and leave me?”

I could not speak at first.  “We have talked too much,” I said to her presently.  But now it was she who would not desist.

“You see, with a woman it is for better, for worse—­but with a man—­”

“With a Saxon man,” I said, “it is also for better, for worse.  It is one woman.”

She sat and thought for a long time.  “Suppose,” she said, “that no one ever came.”

Now with swift remorse I could see that in her own courage she was feeling her way, haltingly, slowly, toward solution of problems which most women take ready solved from others.  But, as I thank God, a filmy veil, softening, refining, always lay between her and reality.  In her intentness she laid hold upon my arm, her two hands clasping.