A FURNACE OF EARTH

A FURNACE OF EARTH

BY
HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES
Author of “Smoking Flax,” etc.

As silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.

—DAVID.

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1900,
By The Camelot Company,
New York.

TO
R. W.

Their first estate of joy they leave,

So pure, impassioned and elate,

And learn from Piety to grieve

Because their hearts are passionate.

—The Revelation of St. Love the Divine.

THE ELEMENTS.

EARTH, AIR AND WATER.

Along the wavering path which followed the twisting summit of the cliffs toiled a little figure. His face was tanned, and from under a brown tangle of hair looked eyes blue and fearless.

He had walked a mile, and home lay a mile further, where white-painted cottages glowed against the close green velvet of the hills. The way ran staggeringly, and the boy was tired.

A group of ragged children tossed up their caps and shouted from the cluster of fishermen’s huts set further back from the sea; he did not heed them, but seated himself on the tufted panic-grass and turned his eyes seaward. The hot sun slanted silver-bright flashes from the moody water, and whistling swallows, beyond the cliff-edge, soared and dropped against the blue of the sky, like black balls from a juggler’s hands. A light breeze, lifting, ruffled with a million ripples the gray surge, played along the path in scurrying dust-whorls and cooled his hot cheeks.

On its heels came stealthily a yellowish dimness; a sullen bank of cloud crept swiftly along the northern horizon. From a thin, black line, it grew to a pall, rising ominous and threatening. Quick flashes pricked its jagged edge. Beneath it the sea turned to a weight of liquid lead.

The boy Richard rose fascinated, his eyes upon the advancing squall, his ears open to the rising breathing of the waves, troubled by under-dreams. His lips were parted eagerly, and his browned hands clutched at the brim of his hat. Often and often, from his window, he had seen the power of the storm; now its near and intimate presence throbbed through him.

The foremost gust struck him with sudden fury, turning him about as though with strong hands upon his shoulders, and tearing his hat from his grasp. He caught his breath with a sense of outraged dignity; then, bending his head resolutely to the onslaught, he stumbled forward. The air was full of scudding mist-streaks, and twisted roots caught at his feet in the half-darkness. The fierce wind tore with its claws at the little jacket, buttoned bravely, and tossed the damp, rebellious hair. The fishermen’s huts lay just behind him, a dry and beckoning shelter; before him, for a few paces, stretched the path leading into ghostly obscurity. The boy bent low, bracing his legs doggedly against the stubble, and foot by foot went on along that lone mile into the storm.

On a sudden the blurred sea-view was swallowed up. The wind swooped, grasping at his ankles. It picked up pebbles and flung them, howling, against his body. They stung like heavy hail. It snapped off unwilling twigs from the cringing bushes and dashed them into the childish face. But he did not retreat. What was the wind that it should force him back! A mighty determination was in his little soul. His teeth were tight clenched, and his legs ached with the strain. The blast caught away his breath and he turned his back to it. At the moment it seemed to lull, tempting him to go its way, but he would not yield.

Then the tempest gathered all its forces and hurled them spitefully, hatefully against him, barring, lashing him cruelly, thrusting him backward. He dropped upon his knees in the path, giving not an inch. The wind, sopped with heavy rain, fell upon him bodily. He stretched himself flat, winding his fingers among the roots of the wiry grasses, struck down, bruised, but still unconquered.

A lone, pied gull, careening sidelong through the wind-rifts, roused in him a helpless frenzy of anger and resentment. He clenched his tiny fist and shook it at the sky, choking, gasping, sobbing, great tears of impotent rage and mortification blown across his cheeks.

FIRE.

The red-gold of the sun still warmed the late summer dusk. The fading light sifted between the curtains of the window and touched lovingly the checkered coverlid, moulding into soft outline the rounded little limbs beneath. The long hair spread goldenly across the pillow, and the wide brown eyes were open.

Old Anne was going to die—old Anne with the ugly wrinkled face and bony fingers from which all the children ran. She was going to die that night. Margaret had heard it whispered among the servants. That very same night while she herself was asleep in bed! Her soul was going to leave her body and fly up to God.

She wondered how it would look, but she knew it would be very beautiful. Its back would not be bent, nor its face drawn with shining burn-scars. It would be young and straight, and it would have wings—long, white wings, such as the angels had in the big stained-glass window over the choir-box in the chapel. It would have a ring of light around its head, such as the moon had on misty evenings. It would go just at the moment when old Anne died, and those who watched close enough might see. Would it speak? Or would it go so swiftly that it could only smile for a good-by? She wondered if its eyes would be kindly and blue, not dim and watery as Anne’s had been. Her own face was smoother and prettier than Anne’s, but her eyes were dark. Angels always had blue eyes. Its face would be turned up toward heaven, where it was going, and its wings would make a soft, whispering sound, like a pigeon’s when it starts to fly. One would have to be very quick, but if one were there at just the right minute, one could see it.

Oh, if she only could! She felt quite sure she would not be afraid of Anne then, knowing that she was just going to be an angel! If they would only let her! She was so little, and they would be watching, so that maybe they would not notice her. Perhaps she could slip in quietly on tiptoe, and then she would see a real shining soul, such as she herself had inside of her, and which she loved to imagine sometimes looked out of her eyes at her from the looking-glass. A breathless eagerness seized her, and she sat up in the bed, hugging her knees and resting her chin upon them.

She listened a moment; the house was very still. Then she threw down the covers, and jumped in her bare feet to the floor. She sat down on the rug in her white nightgown, and pulled on her stockings with nervous haste, and her shoes, leaving them unbuttoned and flapping. Then she slipped into her muslin dress, fastening it behind at the neck and waist, and opened the door, tugging at the big brass knob, and quaking at its complaining creaks. No one was in sight, and the little figure, with its bright floating hair and rosy skin showing between its shoulders like a belated locust, stole fearfully down the dim stairway, along the deserted hall, and sidling through the half-opened door, stepped out among the long-fingered glooms of the standing shrubbery.

She hesitated a moment, frightened at the outdoor dark, and then, catching her breath, ran quickly around the corner of the house, and down the drive toward the low, clapboarded structure beside the stables, where a lighted window-shade with moving shadows pointed out the room of that solemn presence.

The night air was warm and heavy, and its door stood wide. She crept up close and listened. Between low-muttered words of subdued conversation, she heard a slow and labored breathing—a breathing now stopping, now beginning again, and with a curious rattle in it which somehow awed her. From where she crouched, she could see only the foot of the bed, with its tall, bare posts. There seemed to be expectancy in the hushed voices within, and a quick fear seized her lest she should miss the wonderful sight. Quivering with eagerness, she rose to her feet, and with her fascinated gaze seeking out the old face on the pillow, stepped straight forward into the room.

She heard a rising murmur of astonishment, of protest, and before her light-blinded eyes had found their way, felt herself seized roughly, unceremoniously, lifted bodily off her feet and borne out into the night. She heard, through the passionate resentment of her childish mind, the soothing endearments of Jem the gardener, and she struggled to loose herself, beating at his face with her hands and sobbing with helpless suffocation of anger.

A frightened maid met them at the door and took her from him, carrying her to her room to undress her and sit by her till she should fall asleep. No assurance that old Anne would soon be happy in heaven comforted her. No one understood, and she was too hurt to explain what she had wanted.

So she lay through the long hours, the bitter tears of grief and disappointment wetting her pillow.

I.

The air above the shelving stretches of sand-beach shimmered and dilated with the heat of the August afternoon, as Margaret walked just beyond the yeasty edge of the receding waves. There was little wind stirring, and the cool damp was pleasant under her feet. She had left the hotel behind, and the straggling line of bobbing, dark-blue specks, which indicated the habitual bathers, was small in the distance.

A blue-and-silver bound book was in her hand, and her gray tweed skirt and soft jacket, with a bunch of drooping crimson roses at the waist, made a grateful spot upon the white glare. Summer sun and sea-wind had given a clear olive to her face and a scarlet radiance to her full lips, softly curved. Her hair, in waving masses of flush-brown, flowed out from beneath her straw hat, tempting a breeze.

To her left were tumbled monotonous, low dunes, and beyond them the torn clayey bank, gashed by storms; to her right, only barren stretch of sea and sweep of sky.

At a bight of the shore, under the long, curved hole of a pine, leaning to its fall from the high bank through which half its naked roots struck sprangling, ran a zigzag footpath to a little grove, where hemlock and stunted oak grew thickly. Up she climbed, poising lightly, and drawing herself to the last step by grasping a sprawling creeper. The green coolness refreshed her, and there was more movement in the higher air.

She followed the twists of the path among the low bushes clustering in front of a sparse clearing. Facing her, in the edge of the shade, where the light fell in mottled shadows upon a soft, springy floor of dead pine needles, with its wide arms laced in the rasping boughs of the scrub-oaks around it, stood an unwieldy wooden cross, hewed roughly, its base socketed in stone and its horizontal bar held in place by a rust-red bolt. A cracked and crazy bench, also hewn, was set beneath, and just above this was nailed a heavy board in which was deeply cut this half-effaced inscription:

Here Lies
The Body of an Unknown Woman
Drowned
In the Wreck of the Schooner Bartlett,
May 9, 1871.

and below it, in larger characters, now almost obliterated by gray-and-yellow stains:

Ora Pro Anima Sua.

This was Margaret’s favorite spot. She preferred its melancholy solitude to the vivacious companionship of the cottage piazza, and its quiet tones to the bizarre hues of the beach pavilion. It lay removed from the usual paths, reached only by a wide detour, across bush-tangled wastes or the long, uncomfortable walk up-shore on the hot, yielding sand. Now she sank upon the seat with a deep sigh of pleasure, letting her book fall open in her lap. Her eyes roved far off across the gray-green heave where a buccaneering fish-hawk slanted craftily.

A deeper light was in them as they fell upon the open printed leaf:

“For Love is fine and tense as silver wire,

Fierce as white lightning, glorious as drums

And beautiful as snow-mountains. Swift she is

As leaping flame and calm as winter stars.”

Its chaste beauty had long ago stamped the passage upon her memory; to-day the lines hymned themselves to a subtle, splendid music.

Tossing the volume suddenly to one side, her hands loosed her belt. She held the limp band movelessly a moment, and then bent her face eagerly over it. Under her fingers the filigree of the clasp slid back, disclosing a portrait. It was that of a man, young, resolute-faced, with brown, wavy hair parted in the middle, and candid forehead. It was rugged and masterful, but with a sweetness of lips and a tender, gray softness of proud eyes that bespoke him not more a doer than a dreamer.

As she looked, her lips parted and a faint color crept up her neck, showing brightly against the auburn hollows of her hair. She fondled and petted the ivory with her hands, and then raised it to her lips, kissing it, murmuring to it, and folding it over and over in the warm moistness of her breath.

Holding it against her face, she walked up and down the open space with quick, pushing steps, her free hand stripping the leaves from the sweeping bush fronds, her hat fallen back, swaying from the knotted streamers caught under the slipping coil between her shoulders. Stopping at length in front of the bench, she hung the belt upon a corner of the carven board, its violet weave tinging the weathered grain and the painted circlet glowing like a jewelled period for the massive lettering.

With one knee on the warped seat, she read again the fading sentences.

“An unknown woman.” Gone down into the cold green depths! Perhaps with a dear, glowing secret in her heart, a one name bubbling from her lips, a new quivering something in her soul, which the waters could not still! That body buffeted and tossed by rearing breakers, to lie nameless in a neglected grave; that soul, its earthly longing forgotten, to go forever unregretful of what it had cried for with all the might of its human passion!

Ah! but did it? If death touched her own soul to-day! “For love is strong as death. * * * Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it!” In imagination she felt the numbing clasp of the dragging under-deeps; she saw her soul wandering, wraith-like, through shadowless, silent spaces and across infinite distances. Would it bear with it a placid joy? Would it know no quicker heart-beat, no tears that reddened the eyelid, no tender thrill in all its lucent veins? Would nothing, nothing of that strange, sweet wildness that ran imprisoned in all her blood cling to it still?

The thought bit her. She reached up and snatched down the belt, pressing the clasp tightly with her cheek in the curve of her shoulder, repeating dumbly to herself the pious “Ora pro anima sua” that stood before her eyes.

A far crackling struck across her mood, and hastily drawing the belt about her waist, she leaned sideways from the upright beam, raising her hand quickly, as if to put back the lawless meshes of her hair. She heard the sound of a confident step, crunching on the marly sand, and the swish of bent-back bushes. It was coming in a direct line toward her. There was a dry clatter of falling fence-rails, as though the intruder, disdaining obstacles, preferred to walk through them.

She caught a glimpse of a familiar, bright-colored scarf between the glimmering, leafy tangles, and then the thrust of a quick spring, and an instant later the figure that had vaulted the heavy fence came dropping, feet foremost, through the snapping screen of brambles, and walked straight toward the spot where she had risen to her feet with a little glad cry.

II.

“Give me your hand,” he said peremptorily. They were on a pebbly spur of the descending path, and Daunt had leaped down below her. As she stretched it out to him, he drew it sharply toward him. She felt herself grasped firmly in his arms, swung off and lifted to the smooth level beneath. She could feel his uneven breaths stirring in the roots of her hair, and his wrists straining. Her head fell against his shoulder and her look met his, startled. His sunburned face was pale, and his gray eyes were hazed with a daring softness.

Then, as she lay passive in his arms, a fiery longing grew swiftly in them, and he suddenly bent his head and kissed her—again and again. She felt her unused mouth moulding to answering kisses beneath his own, and her cheeks rushing into a flame. Through her closed lids the sun hung like a rosy mist of woven sparkles.

“I love you!—you!—you!” he said, stammering and hoarsely. “I love you!”

The tumbling passion of the utterance pierced through her like a spear of desperate gladness. Every nerve reached and quivered, tendril-like. His deep breathing, toned with the dripping lap of the shingle seemed to throb through her. She lay quiet, breathless, her lashes drooped, her very skin tense under the lasting burn of his lips.

“Margaret! Ardee, dear! Look at me!”

Her eyes flowed into his. From a blur under cloud-pale eyelids, they had turned to violet balls, shot through with a trembling light. The look she gave him melted over him in a rage of love. Desire bordered it, a smile dipped in it, promise made it golden, and he saw his own longing painted in it as a pilgrim sees his reflection in a slumbering pool.

She clasped her hands on his head, pushing back his cloth cap, and framing his face in the long, sweeping oval of her arms. He could feel little vibrant thrills in her fingers. He held her tightly, masterfully, first at arm’s length, laughing into her wide eyes, and then close, folding her, pressing her hair with his hands.

The leaves from the roses she wore fell in splotches of deep red, sprinkling the brown-veined sand at their feet; the dense, bruised odor, mixed with the salty breath of seaweed, seemed to fill and choke all her swaying senses.

“It is like a storm!” she said. “I have dreamed of it coming at the last gently, like a bright morning, but it isn’t like that! It seemed as if that were the way it would come to me—like a still, small voice—but it isn’t! It’s the wind and the earthquake and the fire! Oh!” she said, drawing her breath in a long, shuddering inhalation. “Do you smell that rose-scent? Did ever any roses smell like that? They—they make me dizzy! Feel me tremble.”

Every pulsation of her frame ran through him with a swift, delicious sensation, like the touching of rough velvet. Her curling hair, where it sprang against his neck, ridged his skin with a creeping delight.

“Do you know,” he said, “you are like a great, tall, yellow lily. Some gnome has drawn amber streaks in your hair—it shines like a gold-stone—and rubbed your cheeks with a pink tulip leaf! And your lips are like—no, they are like nothing but ripe strawberries! Nobody could ever describe your eyes; they are most like a bed of purple violets set in a brown cloud with the sun shining through it. Tell me!” he said suddenly. “Do you love me? Do you? Do you?”

“Yes! yes! yes! Oh,” she breathed, “what is there in your hands? I want them to touch me!”

He passed his palms lightly along the bow-like curve of her cheek.

“It is like fire and flowers and music,” she said, “all rolled into one. And those roses! They are attar. The sand looks as if it were bleeding!”

“Shall you think of me when I am on the train to-night?”

“All the time—every minute!”

“And to-morrow, while I am in the city?”

“Yes!”

“And Monday?”

“Then you will come back to me!”

He strained her to him in the white sunlight, and kissed her again, on the lips and forehead and hands, and she clung to him, lifting her face to him eagerly and passionately.

Margaret stood watching the firm-knit figure as it crossed the sand space. She saw the lift of his lithe shoulders as he pulled himself up the bank, saw his form splashed against the sky, saw the flutter of his handkerchief as he flung her a last signal.

She waved her hand in return, and he disappeared.

Then she ran to a slant spile rising lonely from the sand, and sank down quivering. It seemed to her as if she could bear no more joy; her body ached with it. She threw up her hands and laughed aloud in sheer ecstasy.

Then she remembered that she had left her book in the grove, and she stumbled up and walked back slowly, smiling and humming an air as she went along.

The first shade of the dimming afternoon lay under the trees as she climbed again to the little clearing, and the sunbeams glanced obliquely from the crooked oak branches. The air was very still and freighted only with the soft swish of the ebb-tide and the clean fragrance of balsam. Her book lay open and face down on the plank seat. She picked it up and sat down, leaning back.

She was still humming, low-voiced, and as she sat she began to sing—not strongly, but hushed, as though for a drowsy ear—with her face lifted and her dreamy eyes upon the sea margin.

“Purple flower and soaring lark,

Throbbing song and story bold,

All must pass into the dark,

Die and mingle with the mold.

Ah, but still your face I see!

Bend and clasp me; Sweet, kiss me!”

It was Daunt’s song, the one he most loved to hear her sing. But to-day it had a new, rich meaning. She stretched her hands on either side, grasping the seat, and sang on to the bending boughs, rubbing slowly against the weather-stained beam arms above her head:

“Dear, to-day shall never rust!

What, are we to be o’erwise?

All that doth not smell of dust

Lieth in your lips and eyes.

So, while loving yet may be,

Bend and fold me; Sweet, kiss me!”

The shade grew darker as she sat. It deepened the brown of her eyes and the sea-bloom in her cheeks, and the loitering lilac of the west touched the coils of her hair, as they lay against the gray board, blotting with their living bronze the half-effaced, forgotten inscription:

Pray for Her Soul.

III.

In the pause before the service began, Margaret’s eyes drifted aimlessly about the dim body of the small but pretentious seaside chapel. It held the same incongruous gathering so often to be seen at coast resorts, a mingling of ultra-fashionable summer visitors, and homely and uncomfortably well-dressed village folk. There was Mrs. Atherton, whose bounty had elevated the parish from a threadbare existence, with simple service and plain altar furniture, to a devout adherence to High Church methods, with candles and rich vestments, and a never-failing welcome for stylish visiting clergymen from the city; there was the wife of the proprietor of the Beach Hotel, whose costumes were always faithful second editions of Mrs. Atherton’s; there were the rector’s two daughters and the usual sprinkling of familiar faces that she had passed on the drive or the beach walk.

The lawn outside was shimmering with the heat that had followed an over-night shower, and the pewed calm oppressed her. Her limbs were nettled with teasing pricks of restlessness.

The open windows let in a heavy, drenched rose-odor, tinged with a distant salt smell of sea. The air was weighted with it—it was the same mingled odor that had filled her nostrils when she stood with Daunt on the shore, with the wet wind in their faces and fluttering petals of the crushed roses she had worn staining the dun sand and crisp, strown seaweed like great drops of blood. It overpowered her senses. She breathed it deeply, feeling a delicious intoxication, and its suggested memory ran through her veins like an ethereal ichor, tingling to her finger ends.

Her eyes, heavy and swimming, were full of the iridescent colors of the stained-glass window opposite, with the dull yellow aureole about the head of the central figure. The hues wove and blended in a background of subdued harmony, lending life and seeming movement to the features.

“A man somewhat tall and comely, his hair the color of a ripe chestnut, curling and waving.” The description recurred to her, not as though written to the Roman Senate by Lentulus, Governor of Judea, but as if printed in bossed letters about the rim of the picture. “In the middle of his head a seam parteth it, after the manner of the Nazarites. His forehead is plain and very delicate, his face without spot or wrinkle, beautified with a lovely red; his nose and mouth of charming symmetry. His look is very innocent and mature; his eyes gray, clear and quick. His body is straight and well proportioned, his hands and arms most delectable to behold.”

“His eyes gray, clear and quick.” From the window they followed her—the eyes that had looked into hers on the beach, full of longing light—the eyes that had charmed her and had seemed to draw up her soul to look back at them.

She dragged her gaze away with a quick shudder, to a realization of her surroundings. A paining recoil seized her at the temerity of her thought, and her imaginings shrank within themselves. A vivid shame bathed her soul. She felt half stifled.

The dulled and droning intonation of the reader came to her as something banal and shop-worn. He was large and heavy-voiced. His hair was sandy and thin, and his skin was of that peculiar pallor and pursiness bred of lack of exercise and a full diet. It reminded her irresistibly of pink plush. He had a double chin, and he intoned with eyes cast down, and his large hands clasped before him, after the fashion affected by the higher church. His monotonous and nasal utterance glossed the periods with unctuous and educated mispronunciation. The congregation was punctuated with nodding heads.

To Margaret, listening dully, there seemed to be an inexpressible incongruity between the man and the office, between the face and the robes, which should have lent a spirituality. She looked about her furtively. Surely, surely she must see that thought reflected from other faces; but her range of vision took in only countenances overflowing with conscious Sabbath rectitude, heads nodding with rhythmic sleepiness and eyes shining with churchly complacency. Suddenly through the rolling periods the meaning struck through to Margaret, and her wandering mind was instantly arrested.

“For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are of the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”

She heard the words with painful eagerness. Her mind seemed suddenly as acute, as quick to record impressions as though she had just awakened from a long sleep.

A woman in a pew to Margaret’s right dropped her prayer-book with a smart crash onto the wooden floor. The smooth brows drew together sharply and his voice, pauseless, took on a note of asperity, of irritated displeasure. Reading was a specialty of his, and to be interrupted spoiled the general effect and displeased him.

“Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.”

“So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”

An old man, bent and deaf, sat close up under the reader’s desk. He leaned forward with elbow on knee and one open palm behind a hairy ear. His eyes were raised, and his look was rapt. Margaret could see his side-face from where she sat. He saw only the sanctified figure of the priest and heard no human monotone, but the voice of God, speaking through the lips of His anointed. He was a real worshipper. For her the spiritual was swallowed up. That one bodily image stood before her inner self. It had blotted out her diviner view; it had even thrust itself behind the flowing robes and sandaled feet and had dared to usurp the place of the eternal symbol of human spirituality!

She locked her hands about her prayer-book, pinching them between her knees. The woman directly in front of her wore a hot, figured silk and a drab mull boa that looked dreadfully like bunched caterpillars. The riotous rose-odor made her faint and sick, and she had a horrible feeling that the carved heads of the jutting stone work were laughing evilly at her.

A strangling terror of herself seized her—a terror of this new and hideous darkness that had descended upon her spirit—a terror of this overmastering impulse which threatened her soul. It was part of the dominance of the flesh that its senses should be opened only to itself, only to the earthy and the lower. This penalty was already upon her; of all in that congregation, she, only she, must see the bestial lurking everywhere, even in God’s house, and in the vestments of His minister.

“So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”

It was part of their punishment that they could no longer please themselves. Out from every shape of nature and art, from the shadows of grove and the sunshine of open plain, from the crowded street and from the silent church must start forever this spectre, this unsightly comrade of fleshly imagination. This was what it meant to be carnally minded. Margaret’s soul was weak and dizzy with pain.

For in some such way will every woman cry. The very purity of her soul will rise to bar out the love that is of earth, earthy—the beautiful human love so young, so tender-eyed and warm-fingered, and with the lovely earth-light that is about its brows. And then, when the soul grows weary of the pallid thoughts, when the chill of the shadows strikes through—when the walls grow cold and the soul lifts iron bar and chain to let in the human sunshine, then the pale images that throng the house gather and are frightened at the very joy of the sun, and they try to shut the door again against the shining, and sit sorrowful in a trembling dark.

The cry of the woman is, “Give me soul! Give me spirituality!” Oh, loved hand! Oh, eyes! Oh, kissed lips and fondled hair! The woman’s love gives to each of you a soul. You will shine for her in her nethermost heaven.

“Tell me not of my love,” she cries, “that it is corporeal and must fade! Tell me only that it is of the spirit, a fond and heavenly light, such as never was in earthly sunrise or in evening star! A soul, but not a body! An essence, but no substance! It is too lovely to be of earth, too sweet to be only of this failing human frame. Its speech is the speech of angels, and its eyes are like the cherubim. Tell me not that it is not all of the soul!” So, until she dreams the last dream of love in earth-gardens, until she closes her soul’s eyes to dream of the humanity of love, the dignity of human passion, until then she perfumes the lily and paints the rose.

When the temperament that loves much and is oversensitive opens the gates of its sense to human passion, if its spiritual side recoils, it recoils with self-renunciation and with tears. The pain of such renunciation makes woman’s soul weak. Its self-probings and the whips of its conscience, made a very inquisitor, form for her a present horror. She cries out for the old dream, the old ideal, the old faith! It is the tears she sheds for this which drop upon the wall of the world’s convention and temper it to steel.

“Therefore, brethren, we are debtors not to the flesh to live after the flesh. For, if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”

The droning voice of the reader hummed in Margaret’s ears. She came to herself again, almost with a start, dimly conscious that the woman in crêpe in the next pew was watching her narrowly. She must sit out the service. She fell to studying the pattern of the embroidery on the altar cloths. It was in curiously woven arabesques, grouped about the monogram of Christ. Anything to withdraw her eyes from the face of the reader, for which she was beginning to feel a growing and unreasoning repulsion.

Throughout the remainder of the sermon she kept her gaze upon her open Bible, turning up mechanically all the cross references to the word “flesh.” She followed the contradistinction of flesh and spirit through the New Testament. It was the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, contrary the one to the other. The lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life—these all of the world.

The voice of the priest ran along in pauseless flow. It seemed to Margaret that he was repeating, with infinite variations, the same words over and over: “So they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”

As she rose for the final benediction, her knees felt weak and she trembled violently. She remembered what happened afterward only confusedly. The next thing she really knew was the sense of a moist apostolic palm pressed against her forehead as she half sat on the stone bench to the right of the entrance, and a smooth, rounded voice saying:

“Mrs. Atherton! Mrs. Starr! will you come back here a moment? This dear young woman appears to be overcome with the heat!”

IV.

Daunt to Margaret.

“New York, Sunday Morning.

“My Very Own!—Is that the way to begin a love letter? Anyhow, it is what I want to say. It is what I have called you a thousand times, to myself, since a one day far back—which I shall tell you about some time—when I made up my mind that you should love me. Does that sound conceited? Did you ever guess it? Over a year I have carried the thought with me; you have loved me only half that time.

“How I have watched your love unfolding! How I have hugged and treasured every new little leaf! I have been afraid so long to touch it; I wanted every petal full-blown, before I picked it, to be mine—mine, only mine, all mine, as long as I lived.

“Since I left you yesterday, to come up to this dismal city, I have been so happy that I have almost pinched myself to see if I were not asleep. To think that all my richest dreams have come true all at once!

“When I think of it, it makes me feel very humble. I shall be more ambitious. I am going to write better and truer. I must make you proud of me! I am going to work hard. No other man ever had such an incentive to grow—to catch up with ideals—as I have, because no other man ever had you to love.

“Yesterday I went directly from the train to the club. I pulled one of the big chairs into a shaded corner and closed my eyes to feel over and over again the deliciousness of the afternoon. I could feel your body in my arms and your head hard against my shoulder and—that first kiss. It has been on my lips ever since! I haven’t dared even to smoke for fear it might vanish!

“All the while I had a curious, vivid, tumultuous sense as though I were in especially close touch with you. It seemed almost as if you wanted to tell me something, and that I couldn’t quite hear.

“After I went to bed I could not sleep for happiness; I wondered what you had been doing, saying, thinking, dreaming—whether you thought of me much, and, most of all, when you knelt down that night! Shall I always be in the ‘Inner Room,’ and shall you look in often?

“A letter is such a pitiful makeshift! I could go on writing pages! I want to put my arms around you and whisper it in your ear!

“The church-bells are ringing now. I can picture you sitting in the chapel, just as you do every Sunday, and, maybe sometimes, just a minute of course, stealing a little backward thought of me!

“Always in my mind, you will be linked with red roses, such as you wore then. To-day I am sending you down a hamper of them. I should like to think of you to-night as sleeping nestled up in them, and dreaming their perfume. I am longing to see you. I feel as though I wanted to roll the day up and push it away to get into to-morrow quicker.

“You will hardly be able to read this—my pen runs away with me; but I know you can read what is written over it all and between every two lines—that I love you, I love you wholly, unalterably.

“God keep you, safe and sound, dearest, always, always—for me!

“Richard.”

Margaret to Daunt.

“Monday.

“I am leaving this morning for a long visit. I cannot see you again. I have made up my mind suddenly—since I saw you Saturday afternoon, I mean. You will think this incomprehensible, I know, but, believe me, I must go.

“Think of me as generously as you can. This will hurt you, and to hurt you is the hardest part of it. Do not think that I have treated our association lightly. I could go upon my knees to beg you not to believe that I have been deliberately heartless. Remember me, not as the one who writes you this now, but as the girl who walked with you on the beach and who, for that one hour, thought she saw heaven opened.

“Margaret Langdon.”

Daunt to Margaret.

“Dear:—You must let me write you. You must listen! What does your letter mean? What is the reason? If there had been anything that could come between us, I know you well enough to believe you would have told me before. How can you expect me to accept such a dismissal? I don’t understand it. What is it that has changed you? What takes you from me? Surely I have a right to know. Tell me! You can’t intend to stay away. It’s monstrous! It’s unthinkable! Explain this mystery!

“I could not believe, when I received your letter to-day in the city, that you had written it. It seemed an evil dream that I must wake up from. Yet I have come back here to our summer haunt to find it true and you gone. You have even left me no address, and I must direct this letter to your city number, hoping it will be forwarded you.

“How can you ask me to submit to a final sentence like this? I feel numbed and stung by the suddenness of it! I can’t find myself. I can do nothing but wrestle with the unguessable why of your going. It’s beyond me.

“After that one afternoon on the sands, after that delicious day of realization that my hopes were true—that you loved me—to be flung aside in a moment like an old glove, like a burnt-out match, with no word of explanation, of reason—nothing! It shan’t stay so! You can’t mean it! You are a woman, a true, sweet woman; you shan’t make me believe you a soulless flirt! There is something else—something I must know!

“I feel so helpless, writing to you. Space is a monster. If I could only see you for a single moment, I know it would be all right. Write to me. Tell me what I want to know. Until I hear something from you, I shall be utterly, endlessly miserable.

“R. D.”

Margaret to Daunt.

“I cannot come back, Richard. I cannot even explain to you why. Don’t humiliate me by writing me for reasons. You would not understand me. What good would it do to explain, when I can hardly explain it to myself? I only feel, and I am wretched.

“You must forget that afternoon! I am trying to do the right thing—the thing that seems right to myself. I must believe in my instinct; that is all a woman has. I know this letter doesn’t tell you anything—I can’t—there is no use—I can’t!

“You know one thing. You must know that that last day, when I kissed you, I did not think of this. I did not intend to go away then. That was all afterward. I had no idea of hurting or wronging you—not the slightest!

“I know this is incoherent. I read over what I have written and the lines get all jumbled up. Somehow it seems to mean nothing. And yet it means so much—oh, so horribly much!—to me.

“M.”

Daunt to Margaret.

“Dearest:—Please, please let me reason with you. Don’t think me ungenerous; bear with me a little. I must make you see it my way! I cheat myself with such endless guessing. Can I have grieved you or disappointed you? Have I shocked those beautiful white ideals of yours in any way? If that walk on the shore had been a month ago, if we had been together since, I might believe this; but we have not. That was the last, and you loved me then! I brought my naked heart to you that afternoon—it had been yours for long!—and laid it in your hand. You took it and kissed me, and I went away without it. Have you weighed it in the balance and found it wanting? Do you doubt what it could give you? Dear, let it try!

“To-day I walked up the old glen where the deserted cabin is. The very breeze went whispering of you and the rustling of every bush sounded like your name. The sky was duller and the grass less green. Even the squirrels sat up to ask where you were with the chestnuts you always brought them. Nothing is the same; I am infinitely lonely here, and yet I stay on where everything means you! When I walk it seems as if you must be waiting, smiling, just around every bend of the rock—just behind every clump of ferns—to tell me it was all a foolish fancy, that you love me and have not gone away! You are all things to me, dear. I cannot live without you. I want you—I need you so! I never knew how much before.

“Only tell me what your letters have not, that you do not love me—that you were mistaken—that it was all a folly, a madness—and I will never ask again! Ah, but I know you will not; you cannot. You do! You do! I have that one moment to remember when I held you in my arms, when your throat throbbed against my cheek, when your lips were on mine, when your arms went up around my head, and when I could feel your heart beating quick against me. Your breath was trembling and your eyes were like stars! Can you ask me to forget that, the moment that I seemed to have always lived and kept myself for?

“It’s impossible! This must be a passing mood of yours which will vanish. Love is a stronger thing than that! I don’t know the thing that is troubling you—I can’t guess it—but I am sure of you. I know you in a larger, deeper way, and in the end you will never disappoint me in that!

“I am hoping, longing, waiting. Let me come to you! Let me see you face to face, and read there what the matter is!

“Remember that I am still

“Your own,
“R.”

Margaret to Daunt.

“‘The Beeches,’ Warne.

“I have been touched by your last letter. I had not intended to write again, yet somehow it seems as if I must. Can you read between these lines that I am unhappy? I have been to blame, Richard, so much to blame; but I didn’t know it till afterward.

“I can’t answer your question; it isn’t whether I love you—it’s how. Doesn’t that tell you anything? I mustn’t be mistaken in the way. You must not try to see me; it would only make me more wretched than I am now, and that is a great deal more than I could ever tell you.

“M.”

Daunt to Margaret.

“If you won’t have any pity for yourself, for heaven’s sake have some for me! What am I to do? I haven’t any philosophy to bear on the situation. I can’t understand your objections. Your way of reasoning your emotions is simply ghastly. The Lord never intended them to be reasoned with! We can’t think ourselves into love or out of it either. At least I can’t. I’ve gone too far to go backward. Since you went I have been one long misery—one long, aching homesickness.

“You ask me not to ‘humiliate’ you by asking for your reasons. Don’t you think I am humiliated? Don’t you think I suffer, too? And yet it isn’t that; my love isn’t so mean a thing that it is my vanity that is hurt most. If I believed you didn’t love me, that might be; but if you could leave me as you have—without a chance to speak, with nothing but a line or two that only maddened me—you wouldn’t hesitate to tell me the truth now.

“You do love me, Margaret! You’re torturing yourself and torturing me with some absurd hallucination. Forgive me, dear—I don’t mean that—only it’s all so puzzling and it hurts me so! I’m all raw and bleeding. My nerves are all jangles.

“I can only see one thing clearly—that you are wrong, and you’ll see it. Only somehow I can’t make you see it yet!

“Daunt.”

V.

The warm October weather lay over the Drennen homestead at Warne. This was a house gigantic and austere, its gray stone walls throwing into relief its red brick porch, veined with ivy stems, like an Indian’s face, whose warrior blood is raging, leant against a rock boulder.

Under the shade of the falling vine-fringe Margaret sat, passive and quiet, on the veranda. From under drooping lids, long-lashed, her brown eyes looked out with a sort of sweet and sober studiousness. Her reddish-brown hair appeared the color of old metal beaten by the hammer here and there into a lighter flick of gold, rolling back from her straight forehead and caught in a loose, low knot. The corners of her mouth were lifted a little, giving an extra fulness to sensitive lips, and the long rise of her cheek, from chin to temple, was without a dimple.

The haze hung an opal tint over the blue hillsides and lent to nearer objects a dreamy unreality. The atmosphere reflected Margaret’s mood. She was conscious of a certain tired numbness. Her acts of the past few weeks had a sort of elusiveness in perspective, and the old house at Warne, with its gloomy stables, taciturn servants, its familiar occupants—even she herself—seemed to possess a curious unreality.

Across the field ran the wavering fringe of willow which marked the little sluggish brook with the foot-log, where often she had waded, slim-legged, as a child. There was the old stable loft from which she had once fallen, hunting for pigeons’ eggs. There were the same gloomy holes under the eaves, from which awful bat shapes had issued for her childish shuddering. Only the master of the house was changed, and he was Melwin Drennen, Lydia’s husband. As a child, he had carried her on his shoulders over the fields when she had visited the place. She had liked him unaffectedly, and the great sorrow of his life had hurt her also.

She was a mere child then, and had heard it with a vague and wondering pain. It had been a much-talked-of match—that between her cousin and this man—and it was only a week after the wedding, at this same old place, that the accident had happened. Lydia had been thrown from her horse. She was carried back to a house of mourning. The decorations were taken from the walls, and great surgeons came down from the city to ponder, shake their heads, and depart. He, loving much, had hoped against hope. Margaret remembered hearing how he had sat all one night outside her door, silent, with his head against the wainscoting and his hands tight together—the night they said she would die.

And that was twelve years ago! She had bettered slightly, grown stronger, walked a little, then declined again. Now for five years past her life had been a colorless exchange of bed and reclining-chair, and, in this period, she had never left the house.

Margaret shivered in the sun as she thought. At intervals she had heard of his life. “Such a lovely life!” people said. She had thought of his self-sacrifice and devotion as something very beautiful. It had been an ever-present ideal to her of spiritual love. In her own self-dissatisfaction she had flown to this haven instinctively, as to a dear example. A strange desire to stab herself with the visual presence of her own lack had possessed her. But in some way the steel had failed her. She was conscious now of a vague self-reproach that her greater sorrow was for Melwin and not for the invalid. Surely Lydia was the one to be sorry for, and yet there was an awfulness about the life he led that she was coming to feel acutely.

The crying incompletion, the negative hollowness of it, had smote her. His full life had stopped, like a sluggish stream. His vitality, his energies, could not go ahead. He was bound through all these years to the body of this death. Love had broadened his gaze, lifted his horizon, and then Fate had suddenly reared this crystal, impassable wall, through which he must ever gaze and ever be denied. He was condemned still to love her and to watch agonizedly the slender gradations, the imperceptible stages by which she became less and less of her old self to him.

Margaret gazed out across the velvet edge of the hills, and felt a sense of dissatisfaction in the color harmony. A doubt had darkened the windows of her soul and turned the golden sunlight to a duller chrome. She was so absorbed that she caught a sharp breath as the French window behind her clicked raspingly and swung inward on its hinges. It was Melwin.

He came slowly forward through the window, holding his head slightly on one side as though he listened for something behind him. She found herself wondering how he had acquired the habit. His face was motionless and set, with a peculiar absence of placidity—like a graven image with topaz eyes. To Margaret it suggested a figure on an Egyptian bas-relief, and yet he looked much the same, she thought, as he had ten years before. Perhaps his beard was grayer and he was more stoop-shouldered, and—yes, his temples looked somehow hollower and older. He had a way of pausing just before the closing word of a question, giving it a quaint and unnatural emphasis, and of gazing above and past one when he spoke or answered. When he had first greeted her on her arrival, Margaret had turned instinctively in the belief that he had spoken to some one unperceived behind her.

“Will you go in to—Lydia?” he said, difficultly. “I think she wants you.”

As Margaret came down the stairway a moment later, tying the ribbons of her broad hat under her chin, his look of inquiry met her at the door, and the tinge of eagerness in his lack-lustre eyes faded back into stolidity again as she told him it was only an errand for Lydia.

She jumped from the piazza and raced around the drive toward the stables. Creed, the coachman, whose wool was growing gray in a lifetime of allegiance to the Whiting stock, was standing by the window, holding a harvest apple for the black, reaching lip and white, impatient teeth of his favorite charge inside the stall. He dropped his currycomb as he saw her.

“Mornin’, Miss Marg’et. Want me fur sump’n?”

“No, I only came for Mrs. Drennen to see how Sempire’s foot is. She says he stepped on a stone.”

The black face puckered with a puzzled look, that broadened into a smile the next instant.

“Marse Drennen done tole dat to Miss Liddy ez a skuse fo’ he not ridin’ mo’. She all de time tryin’ to mek he git out an’ gallavant. He ain’t nuver gwine do dat no mo’. Miss Liddy, she al’ays worryin’ feared Marse Drennen moutn’t joy heseff, an’ he al’ays worryin’ cause she worryin’. She mek up all kinds ob things fur he to do dat way, an’ he jes humor her to think he do ’em, an’ she nuver know no diffunce.”

Margaret had seated herself on the step and was looking up. “You’ve always been with her, haven’t you?”

Creed smiled to the limit of his heavy lips. “’Deed I hev. When Miss Liddy wuz married she purty nigh fou’t to fotch me wid her. Her ole maid sister, she wantter keep me wid dee all back dar in New O’leens. You see I knowed Miss Liddy when she warn’t a hour ole an’ no bigger’n a teapot.

“Meh mammy wuz nussin’ de li’l mite in her lap wid a hank’cher ober her, an’ I tip in right sorf to cyar a hick’ry lorg an’ drap on de fiah. Dat li’l han’ upped an’ pull de hank’cher offen her face an’ look at me till I git cl’ar th’oo de do’. She wuz de peartest, forward’st young ’un! An’ she growed up lak she started, too. Marse Drennen he proud lak a peacock when he come down dyar frum de Norf an’ cyared her off wid he.”

“I remember how pretty she was.” Margaret spoke softly.

“Does yo’ sho ’nuff? She wuz jes ’bout yo’ age den. Her ha’r wuz de color ob a gole dollar, an’ her eyes wuz blue ez a catbird’s aig. She wuz strong as a saplin’, an’ she walk high lak a hoss whut done tuck de blue ribbon et de fa’r.”

Sempire arched his shining neck and whinnied gently for another apple. Creed stroked the intelligent face affectionately. “Whut mek yo’ go juckin’ dat way?” he said. “Cyarn’t you see I’se talkin’ to de ledy?”

He looked into the fresh young face beneath the straw hat with its nodding poppies and drew a deep breath.

“It do hurt me, honey, to see de change! Don’t keer how hard I wucks, I feels lonesome to see how de laugh an’ song done died in her froat. ’Twuz jes one stumble dat done it. She an’ Marse Drennen wuz gallopin’ on befo’ de yuthers. Pres’n’y she look back to see ef I wuz comin’. De win’ wuz blowin’ her purty ha’r ’bout ev’y way, an’ her eyes wuz sparklin’ jes lak de sun on de ice in de waggin ruts. Jes dat minit de hoss slip, an’ I holler an’ he done drap in er heap on he knees, an’ Miss Liddy she fall er li’l way off an’ lay still.

“Seem lak meh heart jump up in meh mouf. I wuz de fust one dyar. She wuz layin’ wid her ha’r ober her face an’ her po’ li’l back all bent up agin de groun’!

“Marse Drennen he go on turrible. He kneel down dyar in de road an’ kiss her awful, an’ beg her to open her eyes, an’ say he gwine kill dat hoss sho’. Den we cyared her back to de house, an’ she nuver know nuttin’ fo’ days an’ days. De gre’t doctors do nuttin’ fer her. She jes lay an’ lay, an’ et seem lak she couldn’t move, only her haid. Marse Drennen he nuver leabe her. He jes set in de cheer an’ rock heseff back an’ forf lak a baby an’ look at her an’ moan same’s he feelin’ et too.

“He don’ nuver git ober et no mo’. Peers lak she’d git erlong better now ef he didn’t grieve so. He hole he haid up al’ays when he roun’ her. He wuz bleeged to do dat, to keep her from seein’ he disapp’inted, ’cause she wuz al’ays sickly an’ in baid to nuver rekiver. He face sorter light up wid her lookin’ on, an’ he try to cheer her up, meckin’ out dat tain’ meek no diffunce. Hit did, do’! He git out o’ her sight, he look so moanful; he ain’t jolly an’ laughin’ lak when he wuz down Souf co’tin’, an’ I hole he hoss till way late.

“She al’ays thinkin’ ob him now, an’ he don’ keer fer nuttin’—jes sit wid he chin in bofe han’s on de po’ch lookin’ down. He heart done got numbed. Seems lak de blood done dried up in he veins an’ some time he gwine to shribble up lak er daid tree whut nuver gwine show no red an’ yaller leabes no mo’. He jes live al’ays lak he done los’ sump’n he couldn’ fin’ nowhar.”

Margaret arose from the step as he paused and turned his dusky face away to pick up the fallen currycomb.

As she walked back to the house Melwin’s figure as she had seen him on the porch rose before her memory—the face of a sleeper, with the look of another man in another life. Before her misty eyes it hung like a suspended mask against the background of the drab stone walls.

VI.

The frost scouts of the marshalling winter had fallen upon the woods which skirted the Drennen estate, and the great beeches were crimsoning in their death flush; the maples enchanting with their fickle foliage, some still clinging to their green, and others brilliant with blushes that they must soon stand naked before the cold stare of the sky. Here and there on some aspiring knoll a slim poplar rose like a splendid bouquet of starting yellow.

At a turn of the road, which wound leisurely between seamed tree-boles, Margaret had seated herself upon a lichened slab of stone. Her loosely braided hair lay against the hood of her scarlet cloak, slipping from her shoulders, and she seemed, in her vivid beauty, the incarnate spirit of the blazonry of fall. Her head was bare and her clasped hands, dropped between her knees, held a slender book, a random selection from the litter of the library table. It was the story of Marpessa, and unconsciously she had folded down the leaf at the lines she had just read:

“I love thee then

Not only for thy body packed with sweet

Of all this world, that cup of brimming June,

That jar of violet wine set in the air,

That palest rose, sweet in the night of life;

Nor for that stirring bosom all besieged

By drowsing lovers, or thy perilous hair;

* * * * * *

Not for this only do I love thee, but

Because Infinity upon thee broods,

And thou art full of whispers and of shadows.

Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say

So long, and yearnèd up the cliffs to tell;

Thou art what all the winds have uttered not,

What the still night suggesteth to the heart.

Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth,

Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea;

Thy face remembered is from other worlds;

It has been died for, though I know not when,

It has been sung of, though I know not where.

It has the strangeness of the luring West,

And of sad sea-horizons; beside thee

I am aware of other times and lands,

Of birth far back, of lives in many stars.”

With the broadening half-smile upon her parted lips and that far splendor in her eyes, she looked as might have looked the earthly maiden for whom the fair god and the passionate human Idas pledged their loves before great Zeus.

The deadened trampling of horse’s hoofs upon the soft, shaly road beat in upon her reverie. The horse, moving briskly, was abreast of her as she started to her feet. There was a sharp, surprised exclamation from the rider, a snort of fear from the animal as he shied and plunged sideways from the flaring apparition. Almost before she could cry out—so quickly that she could never afterward recall how it happened—the thing was done. The frantic brute reared white-eyed, rose and pawed, wheeling, and the rider, with one foot caught and dragging from the stirrup-iron, was down upon the ground. Margaret, without reflection, acted instantly. With a single bending spring of her lithe body she was beside the creature’s head, her slender arms, like stripped willow branches, straining and tugging at his bit, until the steel clamps cut into her flesh. She threw all the power of her arm upon the heavy jaw, and with one hand reached and clasped tight just above the great steaming, flame-notched nostrils. The fierce head shook from side to side an instant, then the lifting hoofs became calm, and he stood still, trembling. Slipping her hand to the bridle, she turned her head for the first time and was face to face with Daunt.

She gazed at him speechless, with widening eyes. A leaping joy at the sight of him mixed itself with a realization of his past peril. She felt her face whiten under his steadfast gaze. A thousand times she had imagined how they might meet, what she might say, how she would act, and now, without a breath of warning, Fate had set him there beside her. His hand lay next hers upon the rein of the animal, which a single faltering of her finger, a drooping of her eyelash would have left to drag him helpless to a terrible death. A breathless thanksgiving was in her soul that she had not swerved in foot or hand.

Suddenly she noticed that his left hand hung limp, and her whole being flamed into sympathy. “Oh, your poor wrist! You have hurt it!” Her fingers drew his arm up to her sight. Her look caressed his hand.

“It’s nothing,” he said hastily, but with compressed lips. “I must have wrenched it when I tumbled. How awkward of me!”

“It was I who frightened your horse; and no wonder, when I jumped up right under his feet.”

“And in that cloak, too!” he said, his eye noting the buoyancy of her beauty and its grace of curve.

The rebellious waves of her brown hair had filched rosy lustres from her garb, and the blood painted her cheeks with a stain like wild moss-berries. Her eyes chained his own. She had not yet released his hand, but was touching it with the purring regard of a woman for an injured pet. The allurement of her physical charm seemed to him to pass from her finger-tips like pricklings of electricity from a Leyden jar.

Daunt shook off her hand with an uncontrollable gesture, and with his one arm still thrust through the bridle, drew her close to him and kissed her—kissed her hair, her forehead, her half-opened eyes, her mouth, her throat, her neck.

She felt his lips scorch through her cloak. He dropped upon his knees, still holding her, and showered kisses upon the rough folds of her gown.

“Margaret!” he cried, “you know why I have come! You know what I want! I want you! Forgive me, but I couldn’t stay away. Do you suppose I thought you meant what you said in those letters? Why should you run away from me? Why did you leave me as you did? What is the matter?”

As he looked up at her, he saw that the light had died out of her eyes. Her lips were trembling. Her face was marked by lines of weariness. She repulsed him gently and went back a few steps, gazing at him sorrowfully.

“You shouldn’t have come,” she said then. “You ought to have stayed away! You make it so hard for me!”

“Hard?” His voice rose a little. “Don’t you love me? Have you quit caring for me? Is that it?”

“No—not that.”

“Do you suppose,” he went on, “that I will give you up, then? You can’t love a man one day and not love him the next! You’re not that sort! Do you think I would have written you—do you think for one minute I would have come here, if I hadn’t known you loved me? What is this thing that has come between us? What is it takes you from me? Doesn’t love mean anything? Tell me!” he said, as she was silent. “Don’t stand there that way!”

“How can I?” she cried. “I tried to tell you in those letters.”

“Letters!” There was a rasp in Daunt’s voice. “What did they tell me? Only that there was some occult reason—Heaven only knows what—why it was all over; why I was not to see you again. Do you suppose that’s enough for me? You don’t know me!”

“No, but I know myself.”

“Well, then, I know you better than you know yourself. You said you didn’t want to see me again! That was a lie! You do want to see me again! You’re nursing some foolish self-deception. You’re fighting your own instincts.”

“I’m fighting myself,” she said; “I’m fighting what is weak and miserably wrong. I can’t explain it to you. It isn’t that I don’t know what you think. I don’t know where I stand with myself.”

“You loved me!” he burst forth, in a tone almost of rage. “You loved me! You know you did! Great God! you don’t want me to think you didn’t love me that day, do you?” he said, a curiously hard expression coming into his eyes.

“I don’t know.” She spoke wearily. “I—don’t—know. How can I know? Don’t you see, it isn’t what I thought then—it isn’t what I did. It’s what was biggest in my thought. Oh—” she broke off, “you can’t understand! You can’t! It’s no use. You’re not a woman.”

“No,” he said roughly, “I’m not a woman. I’m only a man, and a man feels!”