“I thought you would marry me,” John said, “and that we would go to live in the farmhouse with the white rocks.”

His tone made her eyes fill again.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Yes, but I can’t leave it this way, Martie,” John said.  “If I did come suddenly upon you, if I did take you by surprise:  why, I can give you time.  You can have all the time you want!  I’ll stay here in the village—­at the hotel, and see you every day, and we’ll talk about it.”

“Talking wouldn’t make you anything but a divorced man, John,” she said.

“But you can’t blame me for that—­Adele did that!”

“Yes, I know, dear.  But the fact is a fact, just the same.”

“But—­” He began some protest eagerly; his voice died away.

“See here, John.”  Martie locked her hands about the empty, battered pan that had held the chickens’ breakfast.  “I was a girl here, ten years ago, and I gave my parents plenty of trouble.  Then I married, and I suffered—­and paid—­for that.  Then I came home, shabby and sad and poor, and my father and sister took me in.  Now comes this opportunity to make a good man happy, to give my boy a good home, to make my father and sisters proud and satisfied, to do, in a word, the dutiful, normal thing that I’ve been failing to do all these years!  He loves me, and—­I’ve known him since I was a child—­I do truly love him.  This is July—­we are to be married in August.”

“You are not!” he said, through set jaws.

“But I am.  I’ve always been a trial and a burden to them, John—­I could work my hands to the bone, more, I could write another ’Mary Beatrice’ without giving them half the joy that this marriage will give!”

“That’s the kind they are!” he said, with a boyish attempt at a sneer.

She laughed forgivingly, seeing the hurt beneath the unworthy effort, and laid her fingers over his.

“That’s the kind I am, too!  This is my home, and this is my life, and God is good to me to make it so pleasant and so easy!”

“Do you dare say, Martie, that if it were not for Adele you would not marry me?”

Martie considered seriously.

“No, I can’t say that, John.  But you might as well ask me what I would do if Cliff’s wife were alive and yours dead!”

“I see,” he said hopelessly.

For a few minutes there was silence in the old garden.  John stared at the neglected path, where shade lay so heavily that even in summer emerald green moss filmed the jutting bricks.  Martie anxiously watched him.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked, presently, in a dead voice.

“I ask you not to make my life hard again, just when I have made it smooth,” she said eagerly.  “I’ve been fighting all my life, John—­ now I’ve won!  I’m not only doing something that pleases them, I’m doing the one thing that could please them most!  And that means joy for me, too—­it’s all right, for every one, at last!  Dear, if I could marry you, then that would be something else to think about, but I can’t.  It would never be a marriage at all, in my eyes—­”