“O, Alec, I wish you wouldn’t give me anything at all! I cannot take it from you! I don’t like—it is not right!”
“It is right!” he cried lightly. “I am not going to see a woman whom I feel so tenderly for as I do for you in trouble without trying to help her.”
“But I am very well off! I am only in trouble about—about—not about living at all!”
She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears dripping upon the fork-handle and upon the clods.
“About the children—your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been thinking of them.”
Tess’s heart quivered—he was touching her in a weak place. He had divined her chief anxiety.