ething like 'Willy, we have missed you'; I've just
come. What was the matter out there? Somebody trying to scare you?
Well, there's nothing to be afraid of now, anyway. How you do pant! But
it becomes you. Yes, it does! You look now just like I've seen you all
the time I've been gone! You didn't answer any of my letters; I don't
know as I could have expected any different. But I did hope---- Nelie,
it's no use! I've got to speak out, and it's now or never; maybe there
won't be another chance. Look here, my girl! I _want_ you--I love you,
Nie! and I always d----"

He had got her hand, and he was drawing her toward him. She struggled
to free herself, but he pulled her closer.

Her heart swelled with a fury of grief for all she had suffered and
lost through him. She thought of what her mother had said she ought to
do if he ever spoke to her again; there came without her agency,
almost, three swift, sharp, electrical blows from the hand she had
freed; she saw him reeling backward with his hand at his face, and then
she was standing in her own room, looking at her ghost in the glass.

Now, if Mr. Ludlow knew, he would surely despise her, and she wished
she were dead indeed: not so much because she had boxed Dickerson's
ears as because she had done what obliged her to do it.

XXXII.

It is hard for the young to understand that the world which seems to
stop with their disaster is going on with smooth indifference, and that
a little time will carry them so far from any fateful event that when
they gather courage to face it they will find it curiously shrunken in
the perspective. Nothing really stops the world but death, and that
only for the dead. If we live, we must move on, we must change, we must
outwear every motion, however poignant or deep. Cornelia's shame failed
to kill her; she woke the next morning with a self-loathing that seemed
even greater than that of the night before, but it was actually less;
and it yielded to the strong will which she brought to bear upon
herself. She went to her work at the Synthesis as if nothing had
happened, and she kept at it with a hard, mechanical faithfulness which
she found the more possible, perhaps, because Charmian was not there,
for some reason, and she had not her sympathy as well as her own
weakness to manage. She surprised herself with the results of her
pitiless industry, and realized for the first time the mysterious
duality of being, in the power of the brain an