ithin a month Johannes walked about with a face
like one who tries to guess a riddle-troubled and puzzled;
and Polly was walking elsewhere, carving herself a new
religion from the stones of the bitterness of life.

"I have the rest from her own lips, as she told it when she
came back. Yes, she went away--I will make that plain
enough. It was after a quarrel with Johannes over some
little grossness of no consequence that she walked forth
from the house and down towards the spruit. It was between
afternoon and evening, and she sought a quiet place to sit
and prey on her heart. There was a pool that summer, deep
and very black, lying between steep banks on which grew
bushes and tall grass, and to this she came and sat by the
edge of the water, and dabbled her long thin fingers in its
coolness and let her thoughts surge in her.

"'I thought of death,' she said, as she sat in her chair
and told of it--'of death, and peace, and hatred glutted,
and dead enemies, and love, and sin. A wild storm of
dreams, was it not? A grim tempest to lay waste a sore
heart. And she only eighteen, with eyes like lakes on a
mountainside!' As she told it, she cast back on her memory--
you could see she was aching to strip her fault naked and
scourge it before us all--'And the thoughts were like a
sleeping draught to my anger,' she went on pitifully. 'I
drowned my wrath in dreams of vengeance and sinful hopes of
a joy to find in the future.'

"'I conjured up faces of eager, bold men who should court
me, and one that I had thought on before--a small man, lean
at the waist, who moved like a spark among burning wood,
and laughed ere he struck.' Her finger traveled in the air,
and he was plain to see.

"She went on: 'I was looking in the water between my hands,
creating my lover by the spell of desire, and I could see
his face in the vortex my fingers made as I moved them to
and fro. I gazed and gazed and gazed, and then, suddenly,
some fear gripped me, for the face became a face of a man,
with the idle water swilling across it. But it was a face:
my mind battled against the realization till the fact
governed it. It was a face, brown and keen and smiling with
a gleam of white teeth, and then a hand met my hand in the
water and drew me forward. I did not drag back. I think I
fell on my face, but here I have no memory.'

"When again she came to a sense of things, she was lying in
a dim place where all that moved seemed shadows only. At
first