I looked down at her.  “Well, right in the beginning,” I said, “I should like to know if the woman loved the man—­”

She stared at me and then she stood up.  “If she did, what then?  She had not married to be—­his slave—­”

I pointed to the mother robin on the branch below.  “I wonder if she calls it slavery!  You see—­she is so busy—­building her nest she hasn’t time to think whether Cock Robin is singing fewer love songs than he sang early in the spring.”

She laughed and was down on her knees beside me again.  “Oh, you funny little practical thing!  But it wasn’t because I missed the love songs.  He sang them.  But because I couldn’t be an every-day wife—­”

“What kind of wife did you want to be?”

“I wanted to travel with him alone—­I planned a honeymoon in the desert, and we had it—­and I planned after that to sail the seas to the land of Nowhere—­and we sailed—­and then—­I wanted to go to the high plains—­and ride and camp—­and into the forests to hunt and fish—­but he wouldn’t.  He said that we had wandered enough.  He wanted to build a house—­and have me warm—­his slippers—­”

“And so you quarreled?”

“We quarreled—­great hot heavy quarrels—­and we said things—­horrid things—­that we can’t forgive—­”

She was sobbing on my shoulder and I said softly:  “Things that you can’t forgive?”

“Yes.  And that he can’t.  That’s why I ran away from him.”

I waited.

“I couldn’t stand it to see him going around with his face stern and set and not like my lover’s.  And he didn’t speak to me except to be polite.  And he asked people to go with us—­everywhere.  And we were never alone—­”

“What had you said to make him—­like that?”

She raised her head.  “I told him that I—­hated him—­”

“Oh, oh—­”

She knelt back on her heels.

“It was a dreadful thing to say, wasn’t it?  That’s why I ran away.  I couldn’t stand it.  I knew it was a thing no man—­could—­forgive—­”

I smoothed her hair and rocked her back and forth while she cried.  It was strange how much of a child she seemed to me.  And I was only the wife of a country grocer and lived over the store, and she was the wife of a man whose name was known from east to west, and all around the world.  But you see she hadn’t learned to live.  Neither have I, really.  But Billy has taught me a lot.

I think it was a comfort for her to feel that she had confided in me.  But she made me promise that whatever happened I wouldn’t let him know.

“Unless I—­die,” she said, and she was as white as a lily, “unless I die, and then you can—­set him—­free—­”

Billy was sorry that I had promised.  “Somehow I feel responsible, sweetheart, and I’ll bet her poor husband is almost crazy.”

“Would you be, Billy?”

He caught me to him so quickly that he almost shook the breath out of me.  “Don’t ask a thing like that,” he said, and his voice didn’t sound like his own.  “If anything should happen to you—­if anything should happen—­I should—­I should—­oh, why will women ask things like that—?”