"You were asleep," she said, "and I came down and took it twice."
He did not look at her for he could not bear to see her humiliation.
It was his affair to lighten her self-reproach.
"Well, that was all right. You're the only woman among us, and you've
got to be kept up."
"I--I--couldn't stand it any longer," she faltered now, wanting to
justify herself. "It was too much to bear."
"Don't say no more," he said tenderly. "Ain't you only a little girl
put up against things that 'ud break the spirit of a strong man?"
The pathos of his efforts to excuse her shook her guarded self-control.
She suddenly put her face against his shoulder in a lonely dreariness.
He made a backward gesture with his head that he might toss off his hat
and lay his cheek on her hair.
"There, there," he muttered comfortingly. "Don't go worrying about
that. You ain't done no harm. It's just as natural for you to have
taken it as for you to go to sleep when you're tired. And there's not
a soul but you and me'll ever know it, and we'll forget by to-night."
His simple words, reminiscent of gentler days, when tragic problems lay
beyond the confines of imagination, loosed the tension of her mood, and
she clasped her arms about him, trembling and shaken.
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