eep on my pillow after I had watched the light across the garden go
out and after all in the little parsonage beyond the hedge was dark and
quiet.

CHAPTER XV

A CLANDESTINE ADVENTURE

It seems a strange, almost savage thing that the few months before a
woman's marriage are always filled so full of the doing of thousands and
tens of thousands of small things that she has no time to think of the
hugeness of the responsibilities she is assuming. Perhaps if she were
given time to realize them she would never assume them. Once or twice in
the long two, nearly three months that I had given myself to get ready
to marry Nickols, I paused and found myself thinking of the weighty
things of life, but I soon was able to shake off the thought of the
future. The time I felt it press most heavily was one morning that
Jessie Litton and I sat quietly sewing on some sort of fluff she and
Harriet had planned for my adornment, and very suddenly Jessie laid down
her ruffle and looked at me as she said:

"Charlotte, I would be frightened, positively frightened, at the
prospect of marrying Nickols Powers."

"I am; but why would you be?" I asked her directly.

"I read that long resume of his work in the Review last night and for
the first time I really realized what an important person he is to the
development of American art. He really is a huge national machine and
you'll be one of the important cogs on which the whole thing runs.
You'll be ground and ground by his life and you'll have to make good or
be responsible for some sort of a crash."

"No," I answered, slowly drawing my thread through the sheer cloth. "No,
Nickols will live his own way regardless of the cogs on which it grinds.
I shall have an enormous task in keeping up with the social side of his
life, but Nickols is not the kind of a man who takes a woman into his
work."

As I made my answer I was stabbed by the memory of the words that
Gregory Goodloe had said to me on that day in the garden: "Separated
from you, you going one way and I another, I can do nothing. You
short-circuit my force--I am helpless without you." And _he_ had been
inviting me into the work for which he had been ordained into the holy
Church of Christ. I felt myself groping blindly into the futility of my
own life, and I was sick at heart.

"And if that is so, I would be still more frightened," Jessie said,
gazing at me with dismayed and honest affection.

"Don't let's talk about it," I