st enough if you had really
cared for me," sneered Tremaine.

Elisabeth pondered for a moment, with the old contraction of her
eyebrows. "I don't think so, because, as I told you before, it isn't
really my doing at all. It isn't that I won't give up my religion--it is
my religion that won't give up me. Supposing that a blind man wanted to
marry me on condition that I would believe, as he did, that the world is
dark: I couldn't believe it, however much I loved him. You can't not
know what you have once known, and you can't not have seen what you have
seen, however much you may wish to do so, or however much other people
may wish it."

"You are a regular woman, in spite of all your cleverness, and I was a
fool to imagine that you would prove more intelligent in the long run
than the rest of your conventional and superstitious sex."

"Please forgive me for hurting you," besought Elisabeth.

"It is not only that you have hurt me, but I am so disappointed in you;
you seemed so different from other women, and now I find the difference
was merely a surface one."

"I am so sorry," Elisabeth still pleaded.

Tremaine laughed bitterly. "You are disappointed in yourself, I should
imagine. You posed as being so broad and modern and enlightened, and yet
you have found worn-out dogmas and hackneyed creeds too strong for you."

Elisabeth smiled to herself. "No; but I have found the Christ," she
answered softly.

CHAPTER IX

FELICIA FINDS HAPPINESS

Give me that peak of cloud which fills
The sunset with its gorgeous form,
Instead of these familiar hills
That shield me from the storm.

After having been weighed in Elisabeth's balance and found wanting, Alan
Tremaine went abroad for a season, and Sedgehill knew him no more until
the following spring. During that time Elisabeth possessed her soul and
grew into a true woman--a woman with no smallness or meanness in her
nature, but with certain feminine weaknesses which made her all the more
lovable to those people who understood her, and all the more incongruous
and irritating to those who did not. Christopher, too, rested in an
oasis of happiness just then. He was an adept in the study of Elisabeth,
and he knew perfectly well what had passed between her and Alan,
although she flattered herself that she had kept him completely in the
dark on the subject. But Christopher was always ready to dance to
Elisabeth's piping, except when it happened to be