ere is no reason why that fear
should not be removed, why the latest discoveries in medicine and
science should not be at the disposal of all."

The genuineness of her passion was unmistakable. His whole being
responded to it.

"Have you always felt like this?" he asked.

"Like what?"

"Indignant--that so many people were suffering."

His question threw her into reflection.

"Why, no," she answered, at length, "I never thought----I see what you
mean. Four or five years ago, when I was going to socialist lectures, my
sense of all this--inequality, injustice was intellectual. I didn't get
indignant over it, as I do now when I think of it."

"And why do you get indignant now?"

"You mean," she asked, "that I have no right to be indignant, since I do
nothing to attempt to better conditions?--"

"Not at all," Hodder disavowed. "Perhaps my question is too personal,
but I didn't intend it to be. I was merely wondering whether any event
or series of events had transformed a mere knowledge of these conditions
into feeling."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, but not in offence. Once more she relapsed into
thought. And as he watched her, in silence, the colour that flowed and
ebbed in her cheeks registered the coming and going of memories; of
incidents in her life hidden from him, arousing in the man the torture
of jealousy. But his faculties, keenly alert, grasped the entire
field; marked once more the empirical trait in her that he loved her
unflinching willingness to submit herself to an experiment.

"I suppose so," she replied at length, her thoughts naturally assuming
speech. "Yes, I can see that it is so. Yet my experience has not been
with these conditions with which Mr. Bentley, with which you have been
brought in contact, but with the other side--with luxury. Oh, I am sick
of luxury! I love it, I am not at all sure that I could do without it,
but I hate it, too, I rebel against it. You can't understand that."

"I think I can," he answered her.

"When I see the creatures it makes," she cried, "I hate it. My
profession has brought me in such close contact with it that I rebelled
at last, and came out here very suddenly, just to get away from it
in the mass. To renew my youth, if I could. The gardens were only an
excuse. I had come to a point where I wanted to be quiet, to be alone,
to think, and I knew my father would be going away. So much of my
girlhood was spent in that Park that I know every corner of it, and
I--ob