d, they tell a lie. God is cruel, and it is just like Him to put it
into your heart to throw stones and scare me away from your well."

With these words she burst out into bitter sobs, and her features worked
with various and passionate distortion.

Hermas felt compassion for the weeping Miriam. He had met her a hundred
times and she had shown herself now haughty, now discontented, now
exacting and now wrathful, but never before soft or sad. To-day, for the
first time, she had opened her heart to him; the tears which disfigured
her countenance gave her character a value which it had never before had
in his eyes, and when he saw her weak and unhappy he felt ashamed of his
hardness. He went up to her kindly and said: "You need not cry; come to
the well again always, I will not prevent you."

His deep voice sounded soft and kind as he spoke, but she sobbed more
passionately than before, almost convulsively, and she tried to speak but
she could not. Trembling in every slender limb, shaken with grief, and
overwhelmed with sorrow, the slight shepherdess stood before him, and he
felt as if he must help her. His passionate pity cut him to the heart and
fettered his by no means ready tongue.

As he could find no word of comfort, he took the water-gourd in his left
hand and laid his right, in which he had hitherto held it, gently on her
shoulder. She started, but she let him do it; he felt her warm breath; he
would have drawn back, but he felt as if he could not; he hardly knew
whether she was crying or laughing while she let his hand rest on her
black waving hair.

She did not move. At last she raised her head, her eyes flashed into his,
and at the same instant he felt two slender arms clasped round his neck.
He felt as if a sea were roaring in his ears, and fire blazing in his
eyes. A nameless anguish seized him; he tore himself violently free, and
with a loud cry as if all the spirits of hell were after him he fled up
the steps that led from the well, and heeded not that his water-jar was
shattered into a thousand pieces against the rocky wall.

She stood looking after him as if spell-bound. Then she struck her
slender hand against her forehead, threw herself down by the spring again
and stared into space; there she lay motionless, only her mouth continued
to twitch.

When the shadow of the palm-tree grew longer she sprang up, called her
goats, and looked up, listening, to the rock-steps by which he had
vanished; the tw