Once or twice
David tried to speak to her of her father, but it seemed to rouse in
her an irritated and despairing pain. She begged him to desist and got
away from him as quickly as she could, climbing into the wagon and
lying on the sacks, with bright, unwinking eyes fastened on Daddy
John's back. But she did not rest stunned under an unexpected blow as
they thought. She was acutely alive, bewildered, but with senses keen,
as if the world had taken a dizzying revolution and she had come up
panting and clutching among the fragments of what had been her life.
If there had been some one to whom she could have turned, relieving
herself by confession, she might have found solace and set her feet in
safer ways. But among the three men she was virtually alone, guarding
her secret with that most stubborn of all silences, a girl's in the
first wakening of sex. She had a superstitious hope that she could
regain peace and self-respect by an act of reparation, and at such
moments turned with expiatory passion to the thought of David. She
would go to California, live as her father had wished, marry her
betrothed, and be as good a wife to him as man could have.
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