"I'm afraid the reason is deeper than any your father gave." She looked up baffled. "At least, it's because of what my father said that you--that you--began about Harry Wilbur." "Well, perhaps." "I'm very much disappointed in you." "I'm very sorry." "I thought you were more--understanding. If you had known my father better," she continued, with all-unconscious irony, "you wouldn't have minded him a bit. It was just a theory." "Ah, my child, it isn't a theory that we're first cousins." The note of finality in the low voice pierced her through and through. "But plenty of people--" she burst out; and then one by one her father's arguments and menaces, like curses, came back to roost. "If we rebel against that law, we and our innocent children are punished," she seemed to hear him say. They walked on some time without speaking. Twice Ethan glanced down at the face beside him. For all its profound trouble, it was not the face of one defeated. He drew a perverse pleasure from the observation. Curiosity had from the first played no small part in the charm his cousin cast about him. What would she do under such and such conditions? And, meanwhile, what new longing, what new pain, that mutinous little face had planted in his heart! "I have never kissed her," he kept thinking as he looked at her mouth. "Has Wilbur ever kissed her?" The idea was revolting. He put it from him. He thought of the people that never have children. Suppose-- He looked down at her again. This time he caught her eye, and she flushed hotly. He had no need of speech to assure him they had been thinking along the same lines. "Of course," said Val, with an obvious effort, "I ought to behave as if I didn't understand what's involved. Any _nice_ girl would pretend she--" Her voice got tangled and lost in a dry little sob; but she burst out again under her breath: "Oh, they aren't like _me_--the nice girls. Nobody ever cared so much as I do. Everything's different when you--when you care like this." His heart contracted sharply. Had this come into his life only to go and leave him stricken in poverty? Under the girl's extravagance of speech was a richness of nature that gave her fierce young words authority. This primitive, unfaltering passion, naked and unashamed, was not only beautiful in his eyes with a kind of pagan splendor, but it soothed and satisfied his weary, doubting spirit. For the moment it carried his questioning down its swift current, making of his fears a mock, and whirling his heavy doubts like straws. And yet he kept a vigilant watch upon himself. With a man's abiding fear of being ridiculous, he was uncomfortably conscious of the little group of belated church-goers turning into St. Thomas's from Market Street, not so hurried but they might notice Val's excited face. To his companion, in her absorption, these acquaintances had been thin air.