Ellen Glasgow - The Ancient Law

"Well, the truth is – if you will have it – I needed exercise."

"You might have walked."

"That doesn't reach the shoulders – there's the trouble."

She laughed with an easy friendliness which struck him as belonging to her gallant manner.

"Oh, I assure you I shan't insist upon a reason, I'm too much obliged to you," she returned, coming inside the gate. "Indeed, I'm too good a farmer, I believe, to insist upon a reason anyway. Providence disposes and I accept with thanks. I may wish, though, that the coloured population shared your leaning toward the spade. By the way, I see it isn't mine. It looks too shiny."

"I borrowed it from Mrs. Twine, and it is my suspicion that she scrubs it every night."

"In that case I wonder that she lets it go out to other people's gardens."

"She doesn't usually," he laughed as he spoke, "but you see I am a very useful person to Mrs. Twine. She talks at her husband by way of me."

"Oh, I see," said Emily. "Well, I'm much obliged to her."

"You needn't be. She hadn't the remotest idea where it went."

Her merriment, joining with his, brought them suddenly together in a feeling of good fellowship.

"So you don't like divided thanks," she commented gaily.

"Not when they are undeserved," he answered, "as they are in this case."

For a moment she was silent; then going slowly back to the gate, she turned there and looked at him wonderingly, he thought.

"After all, it must have been a good wind that blew you to Tappahannock," she observed.

Her friendliness – which impressed him as that of a creature who had met no rebuffs or disappointments from human nature, made an impetuous, almost childlike, appeal to his confidence.

"Do you remember the night I slept in your barn?" he asked suddenly.

She bent down to pick up a broken spray of lilac.

"Yes, I remember."

"Well, I was at the parting of the ways that night – I was beaten down, desperate, hopeless. Something in your kindness and – yes, and in your courage, too, put new life into me, and the next morning I turned back to Tappahannock. But for you I should still have followed the road."

"It is more likely to have been the cup of coffee," she said in her frank, almost boyish way.

"There's something in that, of course," he answered quietly. "I was hungry, God knows, but I was more than hungry, I was hurt. It was all my fault, you understand – I had made an awful mess of things, and I had to begin again low down – at the very bottom." It was in his mind to tell her the truth then, from the moment of his fall to the day that he had returned to Tappahannock; but he was schooling himself hard to resist the sudden impulses which had wrecked his life, so checking his words with an effort, he lowered the spade from his shoulder, and leaning upon the handle, stood waiting for her to speak.

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