ace 'home' till
now. And just as the word began to take on a new meaning, she was going
to leave it! Had anyone told her a few short months ago, on the night
that she had first seen what she had inwardly called a hovel, that she
would ever leave it with any faintest feeling of regret, she would have
called him mad. Regret! why the thought of leaving tore her very
heartstrings.

What if it had been only a few short months that had passed since then?
One's life is not measured by the ticking of a clock, but by emotion and
feeling. She had crowded more emotion into these few short months than
in all the rest of her dull, uneventful life put together.

Fear, terror, hatred, murderous rage, bitter humiliation, she had felt
them all within the small compass of these four walls. And greatest of
all--why try to deceive her own heart any longer--here she had known
love. She had fought off the acknowledgment of this the crowning
experience and humiliation as long as she could. She had called on her
pride, that pride which had never before failed her. And now, to
herself, she had to acknowledge that she was beaten.

They were all against her. Her own brother had spoken, only a few
moments ago, of her marriage as horrible. "A girl like you and a hired
man!" She could hear him now. And _he_ had spoken of her leaving as a
matter of course. He couldn't have done it if he had cared. He liked the
comforts that a woman brings to a house, the little touches that no
man's hand can give, that a woman, even as unskillful as she, brings
about instinctively, that was all. Almost any other woman could do as
well. He did not prize her for herself.

And she would go back to England and, as Hornby had gleefully said, no
one need ever know. She would have a place, on sufferance, in other
people's homes. The only change that the year would have made in her
life would be that the check in her pocket, safely invested, might save
her eventually, when she was too old to serve as a companion, from being
dependant on actual charity. And to all outward intents and purposes,
the year would be as if it had never been.

"In six months, all you've gone through here will seem nothing but a
hideous dream," her brother had promised her. Was there ever a man since
the world began that understood a woman! A dream! The only time in her
life that she had really lived. No, all the rest of her life might be of
the stuff that dreams are made on, but not this. And l