It was as well he had nothing, for Julia remembered the jam and went indoors, so he would have had no one to say it to.  She went into the back kitchen, thinking, but not of the jam.  Once again the temptation to sell the daffodil beset her; not to Cross, he was the last man to whom she would have sold it, but to some collector who would care for it as the Van Heigens would.  She could easily find such a one with or without assistance from Cross; little harm would be done to the Van Heigens by it; indeed Joost had expected her to do no less, and if she did it she could pay—­not the debts her father had mentioned—­but the one he had not.  She had thought this all out before, seen the arguments on both sides, and arrived at her conclusion; but there are some things that are not content with this treatment once, nor even twice, but demand it a good many more times than that.  So she thought it out again and came again to the old conclusion.  Joost had given her the bulb because he loved her; he had made no conditions because he believed in her; he had even professed himself content that she should sell it because, in his humbleness and generosity, he wanted only that she should get what ease she could.  He was content to make what was to him a great sacrifice for no other reason than that she should have a little more money on mere caprice, the very nature of which he did not know.  And so she could not do it, that was the end of the whole matter.  She could not take the gift of the man who loved her to pay a debt to the man she loved.

She went to fetch jam pots, without calling herself to order for the last admission.  It was the one luxury she had at that time; daily and nightly she could admit to herself that she loved him and he loved her.  Not exactly passionately—­they were not passionate people, she told herself—­but in an odd companionable equal sort of way which was the best in the world.  Nothing would ever come of it, even in the remote future when her father was dead and the debt paid.  By that time both of them would have grown old and set in their far separate ways, and even if he ever heard that she was free he would have become wiser and changed his mind.  So there was no end to this thing, no awakening and disillusioning, none of the disappointment and dreariness which is likely to attend the translating of a dream into work-a-day life.  For that reason it should have been possible to be content, even with the thing which stood between her and realisation—­sometimes it almost was, at least she persuaded herself so.  At others there were things harder to control; brief moments when crushing down all opposition and obliterating other thoughts, came the memory of how she had crouched behind the chopping-block, how hidden her tears in his coat.  There was no reason or common-sense in that, no friendship or good-fellowship in the clasp of his arms; it was the natural man and the natural woman, and absence could not change it, nor time take it away; it had been, it might be again, it obeyed no law and answered to no argument in the world.  It was something which made her ashamed and afraid and yet glad with a rare incommunical gladness that was pointed with pain.