“A written acknowledgment,” she echoed. For probably fifteen minutes he lay without further talk; then, a little more weariness in his voice than she had ever known before, he began to speak again. “I've been thinking a great deal, Rose.” There was still that new tenderness in the manner in which he pronounced her name, that new tone she had never heard before and which caused her to feel a little nervous. “I've been thinking, Rose, about the years we've lived together here on a Kansas prairie farm--” “It lacks just a few months of being twenty-eight years,” she added. “Yes, it sounds like a long time when you put it that way, but it doesn't seem any longer than a short sigh to me lying here. I've been thinking, Rose, how you've always got it over to me that you loved me or could love me--” “I've always loved you, Martin--deeply.” “Yes, that's what's always made me so hard with you. It would have been far better for you if you hadn't cared for me at all. I've never loved anybody, not even my own mother, nor Bill, nor myself for that matter.” Their eyes shifted away from each other quickly as both thought of one other whom he did not mention. “I wasn't made that way, Rose. Now you could love anything--lots of women are like that, and men, too. But I wasn't. Life to me has always been a strange world that I never got over thinking about and trying to understand, and at the same time hustling to get through with every day of it as fast as I could by keeping at the only thing I knew which would make it all more bearable. There's a lot of pain in work, but it's only of the muscles and my pain has always been in the things I've thought about. The awful waste and futility of it all! Take this farm--I came here when this was hardly more than a desert. You ought to have seen how thick the dust was the first day we got down here. And I've built up this place. You've helped me. Bill didn't care for it--even if he had lived, he'd never have stayed here. But you do, in spite of all that's happened.” “Yes, Martin, I do,” she returned fervently. “It's a wonderful monument to leave behind you--this farm is.” His eyes grew somber. “That's what I've always thought it would be,” he answered, very low. “I've felt as if I was building something that would last. Even the barns--they're ready to stand for generations. But this minute, when the end is sitting at the foot of this bed, I seem to see it all crumbling before me. You won't stay here. Why should you--even if you do for a few years you'll have to leave it sometime, and there's nothing that goes to rack and ruin as quickly as a farm--even one like this.” “Oh, Martin, don't think such thoughts,” she begged. “Your fever is coming up; I can see it.”