ss last
evening: it couldn't have been there long. You see--it's a little
jewellery box from the post-office; here is the name on the lid. Somehow,
Gordon, finding it upset me; I couldn't stop 'til I'd seen you and asked
you about it. Somehow there didn't seem to be any time to lose. I asked
for you last night in the village, but everybody had gone to the
sap-boiling ... I sat up all night ... waiting ... I couldn't wait any
longer, Gordon, somehow. I had to come out and find you, and everybody had
gone to the sap-boiling, and--"

"Why, Lettice," he stammered, more disconcerted by the sudden loss of
youth from her countenance than by her words; "it wasn't--wasn't much."

"What was it, Gordon?" she insisted.

Suddenly he was unable to lie to her. Her questioning eyes held a quality
that dispelled petty and casual subterfuges. The evasion which he
summoned to his lips perished silently.

"A string of pearls," he muttered.

"Why did you crush the pretty box if they were for--for me or for your
sister, if it was to be a surprise? I can't understand--"

"It, it was--"

"Who were they for, Gordon?"

A blundering panic swept over him; Lettice was more strange than familiar;
she was unnatural; her hair didn't shine in the sunlight streaming into
the shallow, green basin; in the midst of the warm efflorescence she
seemed remote, chill.

"For her," he moved his head toward Meta Beggs.

She withdrew her burning gaze from Gordon Makimmon and turned to the
school-teacher.

"For Miss Beggs," she repeated, "why ... why, that's bad, Gordon. You're
married to me; I'm your wife. Miss Beggs oughtn't ... she isn't anything
to you."

Meta Beggs stood motionless, silent, her red cotton dress drawing and
wrinkling over her rounded shoulders and hips. The necklace hung
gracefully about the slender column of her throat.

The two women standing in the foreground of Gordon Makimmon's vision, of
his existence, summed up all the eternal contrast, the struggle, in the
feminine heart. And they summed up the duplicity, the weakness, the
sensual and egotistical desires, the power and vanity and vain-longing, of
men.

Meta Beggs was the mask, smooth and sterile, of the hunger for adornment,
for gold bands and jewels and perfume, for goffered linen and draperies of
silk and scarlet. She was the naked idler stained with antimony in the
clay courts of Sumeria; the Paphian with painted feet loitering on the
roofs of Memphis while the bloc