e 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, 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 grasp 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!

The red bricks, the dusty desk covered with wool, the miserable chicken
peering out, grew sharper and more real. Life was no morbid nightmare
now; her weak woman's heart found it near, cruel. There was not a pain
nor a want, from the dumb question 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 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 countless maze of human faces going
day by day through the same monotonous routine. Knowles, passing
through the restless crowds, read with keen eye among them strange
meanings by this common light of the sun,--meanings such as you and I
might read, if o