"Dear God, how blind we can be! It was not love he felt, nor secret
tenderness. It was not even clean desire, but the novelty of a woman
my
age---thirty-three---who was still fair, and of violating by night the
woman who coddled his son by day.
"But it was more than even that. In his meanness and baseness he knew,
in some measure, what it was I felt for him, and it gave him a twisted
satisfaction to be admired and cherished by a native lass, who meant
to him less than nothing." Again she paused, as if herself overwhelmed
by the memory.
"In time I became pregnant," she said, in a voice almost sad. "And all
my confused, forlorn affection became the more profound. For he had
stirred inside me what even John could not: a child of my own.
"So on the last night that he came to me, as we lay panting side by
side---for I had not resisted him..... I looked over at him in the
gentle candlelight, and with the trembling emotions of a lifetime,
told him that I loved him, loved his son, and now would bear his
child. To think that in that moment I half fancied he would take me in
his arms, and ask me to marry him.
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