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thus. The torment of his soul, the conviction of damnation, the smart of his public disgrace lashed him to passionate brutality.

"What do I want of you now?" he cried. "You refused to come to me when you could come as a girl should. You'd better wait till you 're asked again, or take yourself to your Barnaby!"

To her exalted mood, the answer brought neither pain nor abatement of purpose. She walked on into the

house and, standing within the doorway, repeated:

"I have come to stay."

For one moment he stood dumb with the greatness of his anger. Then he took her by the shoulder and pushed her out on to the doorstep. Behind her the key turned in the lock.

CHAPTER XVIII

TH

THE RIGHTS OF LOVE

HROUGH the agony of surrender, there had awakened in her the marital instinct, which is surrender of personality. In spite of undisciplined mind, he was by far the stronger and exacted submission regardless of tearful resistance. Amanda crouched on the low door-stone, with no deeper conception of finality in her exclusion than has the wife who is thrust uncounted times beyond the threshold. It is the relationship, not the length of its continuance, that dominates.

To Ashgrave, for the moment, she was the incarnate punishment his sins had earned. He attempted no question of the justice of the sentence. His rage was alone torment that took measure of his pain. He knew, without seeing, the crouching figure on the door-stone, and it stung him with the impotence of repentance. He shouted through the barrier that separated them:

"You want to drag me down to hell, you she-devil! I'll have none of you; I 'll have none of you!"

Then he bit himself in his rage that she still crouched there on the stone. He feared neither for her nor himself, lest anyone should come and, finding her there, so read the story of their sin. The world's knowledge, for the moment, counted nothing, as against the weight of his Before all, he comprehended that his sin actually lived, in spite of secrecy and silence. He was not even to suffer his own damnation as an individual finality.

own.

The afternoon grew silent in its depth of sunshine, and

while Amanda yet lay with her head on the low doorstep, she seemed to look down upon herself from some terrible height, to read the sentence written in the crouching form. God had not meant for her thus easily to pass the torture of suspense. She had taken the matter into her own hands to determine, and her purpose was not God's. She had attempted to shun the cross laid upon her, to dictate the time of her punishment, and here was God's warning that she must abide his appointed time and way. She seemed as one standing deep in pity for herself stretched before herself, yet forbidden to soothe the anguish or even touch with the hand of mercy the forehead humbled to the dust. As she had raised her cross and borne it along the way to lay herself at Ashgrave's feet, now she raised it again and returned homeward to abide God's purpose.

At a turn in the way, where the path rose from a thicket of white birch, whose every leaf was adance in the breeze, she came suddenly on Barnaby, who raised a shout of greeting and pleasure:

"Oh, there you are! There is n't a spot I haven't searched, till I thought you'd been translated like Elijah of old."

That he could not know the cruelty of the blow deepened its sting.

"I've got to leave Padanaram," he continued, bursting with news, the weight of which cried for delivery. Then, for the first time, he saw her face and that wonder of sadness which had struck him at the first sight of her. The fact of his approaching departure dominated the moment, and he laid to that the pain of a soul in travail with death itself.

"May I think that you will miss me?" he asked eagerly, hastening to her side.

She looked at him with wide eyes, the eyes of a child who seeks to comprehend what in itself remains meaningless. Then she said slowly:

"No. I shall never miss anything any more."

Something of the incongruity of the answer seemed to work into her consciousness, and she returned his puzzled look with one of equal perplexity.

"Am I to regard that as base flattery?" he asked; and she, the unquenchable force of youth finding way, in spite of the armour of her grief, smiled back at him protest against an eternity of misery, bolstered though it was by two centuries of Puritan pessimism.

"I wonder if you can guess how much I hate to go?" he asked, when the smile had reëstablished relations. "I had hoped to stay so much longer."

"Did you expect to when you came?" she asked, with some revival of curiosity as to why he was there, which was much more forceful before her mother's revealing assertion than now.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know just what I did expect or think in those days." He spoke as if of some far distant time rather than of days that were as yet barely a month old.

To her, too, it seemed as if those days were so far away that it was useless to speculate as to what one had then thought. She had lived so much in these four weeks, that all the effects of a long lapse of time were produced. It seemed as if there were few acquaintanceships that outdated his, and the interest which she felt in his leaving and which, manifestly, he expected her to feel, was robbed of its incongruousness.

"You know I'm coming back," he said.

This reminded her that she had not asked him why he went, and she repaired the omission. A letter from

his father, who was going to Europe on some business of government, called him.

"Perhaps he 'll want you to go with him," she suggested, with a sense of what it would mean if she could leave behind her all that she had ever known or seen and begin anew. It is one of the abatements of sin and misery that one can imagine it a matter of metes and bounds.

"Don't," he pleaded. "It's what I've been afraid of ever since I got his letter."

They came to a bank screened by a dense clump of kalmia, and turned naturally from the way to seat themselves on mossy rocks that were favourites of theirs.

"You do not think you have known me but a little while, do you?" he asked.

"No," she answered, harking back to the impression of the days before she knew him. "I seem to have known you a long, long time."

"Long enough," he asked joyously, tracing their similar impressions to similar causes: "to know that it is not too soon for me to love you for a lifetime?”

She grew pale as she felt the meaning of his words, and that overmastering power of expressing sadness returned to her face. He watched her in wonder whether that was the manner of girls when they receive a declaration of love.

so soon," she gasped.

"You cannot know "So soon!" he repeated. "That was just what I was protesting. It's not so soon. It's so long; I seem to have known you always. I thought that was the way it seemed to you."

"I? I seem to have known you

to live."

ever since I began

The lover in him thrilled with joy. Could one ask

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