"Well?" her eyes slanted sideways in a fixity of attention.
"Would you marry David? Then we could all go on together."
Her breath left her and she turned a frightened face on him.
"Why?" she gasped. "What for?"
He laid his hand on hers and said quietly:
"Because, as you say, the hardest part of the journey is yet to come,
and I am--well--not a strong man any more. The trip hasn't done for me
what I hoped. If by some mischance--if anything should happen to
me--then I'd know you'd be taken care of, protected and watched over by
some one who could be trusted, whose right it was to do that."
"Oh, no. Oh, no," she cried in a piercing note of protest. "I
couldn't, I couldn't."
She made as if to rise, then sank back, drawn down by his grasping
hand. He thought her reluctance natural, a girl's shrinking at the
sudden intrusion of marriage into the pretty comedy of courtship.
"Susan, I would like it," he pleaded.
"No," she tried to pull her hand away, as if wishing to draw every
particle of self together and shut it all within her own protecting
shell.
"Why not?"
"It's--it's--I don't want to be married out here in the wilds.
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