would come back, and she
was equally sure that, for the moment at least, it was she whom he loved
and not Miss Balch. Yet the girl, no less, remained a rival, since she
represented all the things that Charity felt herself most incapable of
understanding or achieving. Annabel Balch was, if not the girl Harney
ought to marry, at least the kind of girl it would be natural for him to
marry. Charity had never been able to picture herself as his wife; had
never been able to arrest the vision and follow it out in its daily
consequences; but she could perfectly imagine Annabel Balch in that
relation to him.

The more she thought of these things the more the sense of fatality
weighed on her: she felt the uselessness of struggling against the
circumstances. She had never known how to adapt herself; she could only
break and tear and destroy. The scene with Ally had left her stricken
with shame at her own childish savagery. What would Harney have thought
if he had witnessed it? But when she turned the incident over in her
puzzled mind she could not imagine what a civilized person would have
done in her place. She felt herself too unequally pitted against unknown
forces....

At length this feeling moved her to sudden action. She took a sheet of
letter paper from Mr. Royall's office, and sitting by the kitchen
lamp, one night after Verena had gone to bed, began her first letter to
Harney. It was very short:

I want you should marry Annabel Balch if you promised to. I think maybe
you were afraid I'd feel too bad about it. I feel I'd rather you acted
right. Your loving CHARITY.

She posted the letter early the next morning, and for a few days her
heart felt strangely light. Then she began to wonder why she received no
answer.

One day as she sat alone in the library pondering these things the walls
of books began to spin around her, and the rosewood desk to rock under
her elbows. The dizziness was followed by a wave of nausea like that she
had felt on the day of the exercises in the Town Hall. But the Town Hall
had been crowded and stiflingly hot, and the library was empty, and so
chilly that she had kept on her jacket. Five minutes before she had felt
perfectly well; and now it seemed as if she were going to die. The bit
of lace at which she still languidly worked dropped from her fingers,
and the steel crochet hook clattered to the floor. She pressed her
temples hard between her damp hands, steadying herself against the des