ed the roses, the
characteristic gesture with which he tossed the waving hair from his
forehead--how she had named the ducks and the peacock and chosen the
spots for his flowers; and she smiled for such memories, even in the
stabbing knowledge that these dear trivial things could mean nothing to
her in the future. She tried to realize that he was gone from her life,
that he was the one man on earth whom to marry would be to strike to the
heart her love and loyalty to her mother, and she said this over and
over to herself in varying phrases:

"You can't! No matter how much you love him, you can't! His father
deliberately ruined your mother's life--your own mother! It's bad enough
to love him--you can't help that. But you can help marrying him. You
would hate yourself. You can never kiss him again, or feel his arms
around you. You can't touch his hand. You mustn't even see him. Not if
it breaks your heart--as your mother's heart was broken!"

She had turned into an unbeaten way that ambled from the road through a
track of tall oaks and pines, scarce more than a bridle-path, winding
aimlessly through bracken-strewn depths so dense that even the
wild-roses had not found them. In her childish hurts she had always fled
to the companionship of the trees. She had known them every one--the
black-gum and pale dogwood and gnarled hickory, the prickly-balled
"button-wood," the lowly mulberry and the majestic red oak and walnut.
They had seemed friendly and pitying counselors, standing about her with
arms intertwined. Now, with the rain weeping in soughing gusts through
them, they offered her no comfort. She suddenly threw herself face down
on the soaked moss.

"Oh, God!" she cried. "I love him so! And I had only that one evening.
It doesn't seem just. If I could only have him, and suffer some other
way! He's suffering, too, and it isn't our fault! We neither of us
harmed any one! He isn't responsible for what his father did--why, he
hardly knew him! Oh, God, why must it be so hard for us? Millions of
other people love each other and nothing separates them like this!"

Shirley's warm breath made a little fog against the star-eyed moss. She
was scarcely conscious of her wet and clinging clothing, and the soaked
strands of her hair. She was so wrapped in her desolation that she no
longer heard the sound of the persevering rain and the wet swishing of
the bushes--parting now to a hurried step that fell almost without sound
on the s