ll on her brain like the sceptre of
her master; if Knowles had looked in her face then, he would have seen
bared the secret of her life. Holmes had gone by, unconscious of who was
within the door. She had not seen him; it was nothing but a step she
heard. Yet a power, the power of the girl's life, shook off all outward
masks, all surface cloudy fancies, and stood up in her with a terrible
passion at the sound; her blood burned fiercely; her soul looked out
from her face, her soul as it was, as God knew it,--God and this man. No
longer a cold, clear face; you would have thought, looking at it, what a
strong spirit the soul of this woman would be, if set free in heaven
or in hell. The man who held it in his power went on carelessly, not
knowing that the mere sound of his step had raised it as from the
dead. She, and her right, and her pain, were nothing to him now, she
remembered, staring out at the taunting hot sky. Yet so vacant was the
sudden life opened before her when he was gone, that, in the desperation
of her weakness, her mad longing to see him but once again, she would
have thrown herself at his feet, and let the cold, heavy step crush her
life out,--as he would have done, she thought, choking down the icy
smother in her throat, if it had served his purpose, though it cost his
own heart's life to do it. He would trample her down, if she kept him
back from his end; but be false to her, false to himself, that he would
never be!

So the hot, long day wore on,--the red bricks, the dusty desk covered
with wool, the miserable chicken peering out, growing sharper and more
real in the glare. Life was no morbid nightmare now; her weak woman's
heart found it actual and near. There was not a pain nor a want, from
the dumb hunger in the dog's eyes that passed her on the street, to her
father's hopeless fancies, that did not touch her sharply through her
own loss, with a keen pity, a wild wish to help to do something to save
others with this poor life left in her hands.

So the hot day wore on in the town and country; the old sun glaring down
like some fierce old judge, intolerant of weakness or shams,--baking the
hard earth in the streets harder for the horses' feet, drying up the
bits of grass that grew between the boulders of the gutter, scaling off
the paint from the brazen faces of the interminable brick houses. He
looked down in that city as in every American town, as in these where
you and I live, on the same countle