He began abruptly. "Judith told me about your father and mother, the whole history, and I hoped that was the reason you had sent me away--that you thought it would matter to me.... I can match you history for history: my father and mother found each other much as yours did, in spite of their different religions, which was quite as insurmountable a difficulty as Edward and your mother faced. My mother was a Jewess and my father an Irish Catholic. They lived together two years, and then, because I had come, they went before a justice of the peace and gave me my father's name. To their way of thinking they weren't a bit more married than they had ever been. Love had married them and they had clung to each other in spite of everything. I've often thought, when I've seen the children a loveless marriage has brought into the world, that I've had the best of it--that those children must be wanting in some way. I never fully realized how much the mere legality of a marriage means to people like your people until I listened to Judith this afternoon.... So, you see, Ann, it doesn't matter to me. It matters a good deal more to me that you've suffered because of the narrow prejudices of your people. You told the collie, when you hugged and kissed him, in the barn, that first day I talked to you, that he and Ben were the only ones that loved you. You have gone hungry and thirsty--that's been the trouble with you." Ann's vagueness had slipped from her; she was quivering from head to foot. "I know it!" she said. "I'm always wanting to be loved an' trying to make people love me, and it's led to fearful trouble. It drove Garvin mad and it took my father--away--from me--" Her voice failed her. Baird put his arm about her, bent and kissed her hands. "Don't think about all that, Ann. You love me--I _know_ you do--there's nothing between us now." But she held him off. "Yes, there is!... Let me tell you: I let Garvin love me--I thought for a time that I loved him. But it was just that I wanted so badly for somebody to love me, an' I know now that the way I felt to him was like I would have felt if I had known he was my father's brother--just that I was fond of him an' sorry for him. I had to tell him so and--" She broke off with a shudder, then went on with head hung. "I've felt differently to you.... Back at the time you kissed me--I loved it. When you used to come an' talk to me, even then I liked you--sitting close by me--even while I was worrying over Garvin an' not knowing what to do, an' at the same time caring more for Edward than for any one else in the world, just _feeling_ that he was my father, an' not knowin' why I loved him so much. That night you met me on the spring house path and asked me if I was engaged to anybody, I told you I'd rather you stayed away, because I was angry at myself for feelin' to you the way I did. I felt _hateful_ caring for three men at the same time, like I was doing. Then when I read your letters this summer--"