Tillie cowered against the door, her eyes on his. Here before her,
embodied in this man, stood all that she had wanted and never had. He
meant a home, tenderness, children, perhaps. He turned away from the look
in her eyes and stared out of the front window.
"Them poplars out there ought to be taken away," he said heavily. "They're
hell on sewers."
Tillie found her voice at last:-"I couldn't do it, Mr. Schwitter. I guess I'm a coward. Maybe I'll be
sorry."
"Perhaps, if you got used to the idea--"
"What's that to do with the right and wrong of it?"
"Maybe I'm queer. It don't seem like wrongdoing to me. It seems to me
that the Lord would make an exception of us if He knew the circumstances.
Perhaps, after you get used to the idea--What I thought was like this.
I've got a little farm about seven miles from the city limits, and the
tenant on it says that nearly every Sunday somebody motors out from town
and wants a chicken-and-waffle supper. There ain't much in the nursery
business anymore. These landscape fellows buy their stuff direct, and the
middleman's out. I've got a good orchard, and there's a spring, so I could
put running water in the house. I'd be good to you, Tillie,--I swear it.
It'd be just the same as marriage. Nobody need know it."
"You'd know it. You wouldn't respect me."
"Don't a man respect a woman that's got courage enough to give up
everything for him?"
Tillie was crying softly into her apron. He put a work-hardened hand on
her head.
"It isn't as if I'd run around after women," he said. "You're the only
one, since Maggie--" He drew a long breath. "I'll give you time to think
it over. Suppose I stop in to-morrow morning. It doesn't commit you to
anything to talk it over."
There had been no passion in the interview, and there was none in the touch
of his hand. He was not young, and the tragic loneliness of approaching
old age confronted him. He was trying to solve his problem and Tillie's,
and what he had found was no solution, but a compromise.
"To-morrow morning, then," he said quietly, and went out the door.
All that hot August morning Tillie worked in a daze. Mrs. McKee watched
her and said nothing. She interpreted the girl's white face and set lips
as the result of having had to dismiss Schwitter again, and looked for time
to bring peace, as it had done before.