law
was not obsolete. He felt that in the abandonment of her indignation she
had mercilessly told the truth; and the irreducible quality of mind in
him which in the old days made for justice, approved. There was a new
element now, however--that conscience which never possessed him fully
until the day he saw Rosalie go travelling over the hills with her
crippled father. That picture of the girl against the twilight, her
figure silhouetted in the clear air, had come to him in sleeping and
waking dreams, the type and sign of an everlasting melancholy. As he
looked at her blindly now, he saw, not herself, but that melancholy
figure. Out of the distance his own voice said again:

"Now--I know-the truth!"

She had struck with a violence she did not intend, which, she knew, must
rend her own heart in the future, which put in the dice-box the last
hopes she had. But she could not have helped it--she could not have
stayed the words, though a suspended sword were to fall with the
saying. It was the cry of tradition and religion, and every home-bred,
convent-nurtured habit, the instinct of heredity, the wail of woman, for
whom destiny, or man, or nature, has arranged the disproportionate share
of life's penalties. It was the impotent rebellion against the first
curse, that man in his punishment should earn his bread by the sweat of
his brow--which he might do with joy--while the woman must work out her
ordained sentence "in sorrow all the days of her life."

In her bitter words was the inherent revolt of the race of woman. But
now she suddenly felt that she had flung him an infinite distance from
her; that she had struck at the thing she most cherished--his belief
that she loved him; that even if she had told the truth--and she felt
she had not--it was not the truth she wished him most to feel.

For an instant she stood looking at him, shocked and confounded, then
her changeless love rushed back on her, the maternal and protective
spirit welled up, and with a passionate cry she threw herself in the
chair again in very weakness, with outstretched hands, saying:

"Forgive me--oh, forgive me! I did not mean it--oh, forgive your
Rosalie!"

Stooping over her, he answered:

"It is good for me to know the whole truth. What hurts you may give me
will pass--for life must end, and my life cannot be long enough to pay
the price of the hurts I have given you. I could bear a thousand--one
for every hour--if they could bring back the li