h
the burying earth, crying, "I am here. How came you to forget?"

She had been cold in the sultry heat of that long noon, and deaf when
voices spoke to her. She was thinking.... How if she might be mistaken in
Beauvayse, even now? He was beautiful and brave and alluring to her
woman's sense in what she knew of him and what was yet to know. He called
her and drew her. Nothing noble awakened in her at the smile on the gay,
bold lips and in the grey-green, jewel-bright eyes. When he had held her
to his heart, she had not felt her soul merge with another, its fellow,
and yet stronger and greater, in that embrace. He and she were not
bodiless spirits floating in pure ether, but an earth-made girl and boy,
very much athirst for the common cup of human rapture, hungry for the
banquet of mortal bliss.

It was sweet, but how if he were another, and not the one? How if her
hasty gift of herself robbed both in the long end? How if his headlong
passion and tempestuous love should be torn from him like rags in the
first instant of that discovery that must almost inevitably be made? She
heard his boyish voice crying, "Hateful!... You have deceived me!" and was
stabbed with quick anguish, knowing him in the right.

Men did not enter into marriage pure. By some unwritten code of that
strange lawgiver, the World, they were absolved of the necessity of
spotlessness. They might slake their thirst at muddy sources unrebuked.
And the more each wallowed, the more he demanded of the woman he wedded
that she should be immaculate in thought and deed--if in knowledge, that
was all the better.

What a cloud of doubts assailed her, swarming like bees, settling in every
blossomed branch of her mind, and blotting out the sweetness with angry
buzzing, furry bodies, armed with sharp stings for punishment or revenge.
She had seen a little peach-tree weighed down and bowed to the red earth
at its roots with the weight of such a swarm. She felt at this juncture
very like the tree. A little more, only a slight increase of the burden,
and the slender trunk would have snapped. When the native bee-master came
and shook the double swarm into a couple of hives, the little tree stayed
crooked. It did not regain its beautiful, healthful uprightness for a long
time.

The Mother had commanded her never to tell Beauvayse. She realised that in
this one sorrowful instance she was wiser than her teacher. If unutterable
misery was not to result from their union,