gered a moment she knew she would have had Ally at her heels.

She hurried upstairs and felt her way into her dark room. Her hands
trembled as she groped for the matches and lit her candle, and the flap
of the envelope was so closely stuck that she had to find her scissors
and slit it open. At length she read:

DEAR CHARITY:

I have your letter, and it touches me more than I can say. Won't you
trust me, in return, to do my best? There are things it is hard to
explain, much less to justify; but your generosity makes everything
easier. All I can do now is to thank you from my soul for understanding.
Your telling me that you wanted me to do right has helped me beyond
expression. If ever there is a hope of realizing what we dreamed of you
will see me back on the instant; and I haven't yet lost that hope.

She read the letter with a rush; then she went over and over it, each
time more slowly and painstakingly. It was so beautifully expressed
that she found it almost as difficult to understand as the gentleman's
explanation of the Bible pictures at Nettleton; but gradually she became
aware that the gist of its meaning lay in the last few words. "If ever
there is a hope of realizing what we dreamed of..."

But then he wasn't even sure of that? She understood now that every word
and every reticence was an avowal of Annabel Balch's prior claim. It was
true that he was engaged to her, and that he had not yet found a way of
breaking his engagement.

As she read the letter over Charity understood what it must have cost
him to write it. He was not trying to evade an importunate claim; he was
honestly and contritely struggling between opposing duties. She did not
even reproach him in her thoughts for having concealed from her that
he was not free: she could not see anything more reprehensible in his
conduct than in her own. From the first she had needed him more than he
had wanted her, and the power that had swept them together had been
as far beyond resistance as a great gale loosening the leaves of the
forest.... Only, there stood between them, fixed and upright in the
general upheaval, the indestructible figure of Annabel Balch....

Face to face with his admission of the fact, she sat staring at the
letter. A cold tremor ran over her, and the hard sobs struggled up into
her throat and shook her from head to foot. For a while she was caught
and tossed on great waves of anguish that left her hardly conscious of
anything b