stood upon. At the outset a certain ignoble pride--she knew it
ignoble--filled her with rebellion. She had seen so much of this kind
of situation, and had heard so much of the general comment. People had
learned how to sneer because experience had taught them. If she gave
them cause, why should they not sneer at her as at things? She recalled
what she had herself thought of such things--the folly of them, the
obviousness--the almost deserved disaster. She had arrogated to herself
judgment of women--and men--who might, yes, who might have stood upon
their strip of sand, as she stood, with the waves creeping in, each one
higher, stronger, and more engulfing than the last. There might have
been those among them who also had knowledge of that sudden deadly
joy at the sight of one face, at the drop of one voice. When that wave
submerged one's pulsing being, what had the world to do with one--how
could one hear and think of what its speech might be? Its voice
clamoured too far off.

As she walked across the marsh she was thinking this first phase over.
She had reached a new one, and at first she looked back with a faint,
even rather hard, smile. She walked straight ahead, her mastiff, Roland,
padding along heavily close at her side. How still and wide and golden
it was; how the cry of plover and lifting trill of skylark assured one
that one was wholly encircled by solitude and space which were more
enclosing than any walls! She was going to the mounds to which Mr.
Penzance had trundled G. Selden in the pony chaise, when he had given
him the marvellous hour which had brought Roman camp and Roman legions
to life again. Up on the largest hillock one could sit enthroned,
resting chin in hand and looking out under level lids at the unstirring,
softly-living loveliness of the marsh-land world. So she was presently
seated, with her heavy-limbed Roland at her feet. She had come here to
try to put things clearly to herself, to plan with such reason as she
could control. She had begun to be unhappy, she had begun--with some
unfairness--to look back upon the Betty Vanderpoel of the past as
an unwittingly self-sufficient young woman, to find herself suddenly
entangled by things, even to know a touch of desperateness.

"Not to take a remnant from the ducal bargain counter," she was saying
mentally. That was why her smile was a little hard. What if the remnant
from the ducal bargain counter had prejudices of his own?

"If he were passion