lize that afterward as we all do when we have
passed through a crisis and have done better, perhaps, than our poor,
unassisted thought might have accomplished for us.

Joyce was on the wheel, and the wheel was going at a tremendous speed.
There was no time for plotting or planning, with all the strength that
was in her, the girl was clinging, clinging to some unseen, central
truth, while she was being whirled through a still place crowded with
more or less distinguishable facts that she dared not close her eyes to.

One cruel thing made her cringe in the deep chair. She was losing her
clear, sweet vision of that blessed night when Gaston and she had stood
transfigured! If only she could have held to that, all would have been
so simple--but with that fading glory gone she would be alone in a
barren, cheerless place to act not merely for herself, but for Gaston
also.

She was no longer the beautiful woman in the golden dress; nor he the
man of the illumined face and pleading arms. No; she was old Jared's
wild little daughter; Jude Lauzoon's brutalized and dishonoured wife.
Nothing, nothing could do away with those awful facts.

He, the man she loved--who thought in one wild hour that he loved
her--was not of her world nor of her kind. He had given, given, given to
her of his best and purest. God! how he had given. He had cast a glamour
over her crudeness by his power and goodness, but underneath
was--Jared's daughter and Jude's wife.

If he took her courageously back to his world they, those others like,
yet unlike him, would see easily through the disguise, and would be
quick enough to make both him and her feel it.

Without her, they would accept him. The past would be as if it had not
been; but if he brought her to them from his past, it would be like an
insult to them--an insult they would never forgive. And then--he would
have no life; no place. He would have to go on being kind and good to
her in a greater loneliness and desolation than St. Ange had ever known.

She could not escape the responsibility of her part in his life. She
might keep on taking, taking, taking. On the other hand his old life had
come back to him, not even waiting for his choice.

The woman who had misunderstood, had failed him in that hour of his
need, had been sent by an all-powerful Force into the heart of the
Northern Solitude to reclaim him, now that he had accomplished that
which he had set himself to do.

Every barrier was remo