ring loud. Never had I loved him so much as now. I
had to struggle with myself not to throw myself into his arms.

"No matter!" he said. "I should be a poor-spirited fool to stay where
I'm not wanted. I must get back to my work. The sooner the better, too.
I thought I should be counting the days down there until I could come
home again. But why should I? And why should I care what happens to me?
It's all as one now."

He stepped back from the balcony with a resolute expression on his
gloomy face, and I thought for a moment (half hoping and half fearing
it) that he was going to lay hold of me and tell me I must do what he
wished because I belonged to him.

But he only looked at me for a moment in silence, and then burst into a
flood of tears, and turned and ran out of the house.

Let who will say his tears were unmanly. To me they were the bitter cry
of a great heart, and I wanted to follow him and say, "Take me. Do what
you like with me. I am yours."

I did not do so. I sat a long time where he had left me and then I went
into my room and locked the door.

I did not cry. Unjust and cruel as his reproaches had been, I began to
have a strange wild joy in them. I knew that he would not have insulted
me like that if he had not loved me to the very verge of madness itself.

Hours passed. Price came tapping at my door to ask if she should lock up
the house--meaning the balcony. I answered "No, go to bed."

I heard the deadened thud of Martin's footsteps on the lawn passing to
and fro. Sometimes they paused under my window and then I had a feeling,
amounting to certainty, that he was listening to hear if I was sobbing,
and that if I had been he would have broken down my bedroom door to get
to me.

At length I heard him come up the stone stairway, shut and bolt the
balcony door, and walk heavily across the corridor to his own room.

The day was then dawning. It was four o'clock.

SIXTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

I awoke on Wednesday morning in a kind of spiritual and physical fever.
Every conflicting emotion which a woman can experience in the cruel
battle between her religion and her love seemed to flood body and
soul--joy, pain, pride, shame, fear, rapture--so that I determined (not
without cause) to make excuse of a headache to stay in bed.

Although it was the last day of Martin's visit, and I charged myself
with the discourtesy of neglecting him, as well as the folly of losing
the few remaining hours of his com