at was that Polston had
said about starving to death for a kind word? LOVE? He was sick of
the sickly talk,--crushed it out of his heart with a savage scorn. He
remembered his father, the night he died, had said in his weak ravings
that God was love. Was He? No wonder, then, He was the God of women,
and children, and unsuccessful men. For him, he was done with it. He
was here with stronger purpose than to yield to weaknesses of the
flesh. He had made his choice,--a straight, hard path upwards; he was
deaf now and forever to any word of kindness or pity. As for this
woman beside him, he would be just to her, in justice to himself: she
never should know the loathing in his heart: just to her as to all
living creatures. Some little, mean doubt kept up a sullen whisper of
bought and sold,--sold,--but he laughed it down. He sat there with his
head steadily turned towards her: a kingly face, she called it, and she
was right,--it was a kingly face: with the same shallow, fixed smile on
his mouth,--no weary cry went up to God that day so terrible in its
pathos, I think: with the same dull consciousness that this was the
trial night of his life,--that with the homely figure on the road-side
he had turned his back on love and kindly happiness and warmth, on all
that was weak and useless in the world. He had made his choice; he
would abide by it,--he would abide by it. He said that over and over
again, dulling down the death-gnawing of his outraged heart.

Miss Herne was quite contented, sitting by him, with herself, and the
admiring world. She had no notion of trial nights in life. Not many
temptations pierced through her callous, flabby temperament to sting
her to defeat or triumph. There was for her no under-current of
conflict, in these people whom she passed, between self and the unseen
power that Holmes sneered at, whose name was love; they were nothing
but movables, pleasant or ugly to look at, well- or ill-dressed. There
were no dark iron bars across her life for her soul to clutch and shake
madly,--nothing "in the world amiss, to be unriddled by and by."
Little Margret, sitting by the muddy road, digging her fingers dully
into the clover-roots, while she looked at the spot where the wheels
had passed, looked at life differently, it may be;--or old Joe Yare by
the furnace-fire, his black face and gray hair bent over a torn old
spelling-book Lois had given him. The night, perhaps, was going to be
more to the