Heigens by it; indeed Joost had expected her to do no less, and if she
did it she could pay--not the debts her father had mentioned--but the
one he had not. She had thought this all out before, seen the
arguments on both sides, and arrived at her conclusion; but there are
some things that are not content with this treatment once, nor even
twice, but demand it a good many more times than that. So she thought
it out again and came again to the old conclusion. Joost had given her
the bulb because he loved her; he had made no conditions because he
believed in her; he had even professed himself content that she should
sell it because, in his humbleness and generosity, he wanted only that
she should get what ease she could. He was content to make what was to
him a great sacrifice for no other reason than that she should have a
little more money on mere caprice, the very nature of which he did not
know. And so she could not do it, that was the end of the whole
matter. She could not take the gift of the man who loved her to pay a
debt to the man she loved.

She went to fetch jam pots, without calling herself to order for the
last admission. It was the one luxury she had at that time; daily and
nightly she could admit to herself that she loved him and he loved
her. Not exactly passionately--they were not passionate people, she
told herself--but in an odd companionable equal sort of way which was
the best in the world. Nothing would ever come of it, even in the
remote future when her father was dead and the debt paid. By that time
both of them would have grown old and set in their far separate ways,
and even if he ever heard that she was free he would have become
wiser and changed his mind. So there was no end to this thing, no
awakening and disillusioning, none of the disappointment and
dreariness which is likely to attend the translating of a dream into
work-a-day life. For that reason it should have been possible to be
content, even with the thing which stood between her and
realisation--sometimes it almost was, at least she persuaded herself
so. At others there were things harder to control; brief moments when
crushing down all opposition and obliterating other thoughts, came the
memory of how she had crouched behind the chopping-block, how hidden
her tears in his coat. There was no reason or common-sense in that, no
friendship or good-fellowship in the clasp of his arms; it was the
natural man and the natural woman, and ab