ena, in poverty and want, stripped of
every defense against wrongs piled on wrongs, rooted over, as she said,
by the very swine, until she should come to some end so dreadful that I
could not imagine it; and not of her alone. There would be another life
to be thought of. I knew that Buckner Gowdy, for she had told me of his
blame in the matter, of her appeal to him, of his light-hearted cruelty
to her, of how now at last, after months of losing rivalry between her
and that other of his victims, the wife of Mobley the overseer, she had
come to me in desperation--I knew there was nothing in that cold heart
to which Rowena could make any appeal that had not been made
unsuccessfully by others in the same desperate case.

I had no feeling that she should have told me all in the first place,
instead of trying to win me in my ignorance: for I felt that she was
driven by a thousand whips to things which might not be honest, but were
as free from blame as the doublings of a hunted deer. I felt no blame
for her then, and I have never felt any. I passed that by, and tried to
look in the face what I should have to give up if I took this girl for
my wife. That sacrifice rolled over me like a black cloud, as clear as
if I had had a month in which to realize it.

I pushed her hands from my shoulders, and rose to my feet; and she knelt
down and clasped her arms around my knees.

"I must think!" I said. "Let me be! Let me think!"

I took a step backward, and as I turned I saw her kneeling there, her
hair all about her face, with her hands stretched out to me: and then I
walked blindly away into the long grass of the marsh.

I finally found myself running as if to get away from the whole thing,
with the tall grass tangling about my feet. All my plans for my life
with Virginia came back to me: I lived over again every one of those
beautiful days I had spent with her. I remembered how she had come back
to bid me good-by when I left her at Waterloo, and turned her over again
to Grandma Thorndyke; but especially, I lived over again our days in the
grove. I remembered that for months, now, she had seemed lost to me, and
that all the hope I had had appeared to be that of living alone and
dreaming of her. I was not asked by poor Rowena to give up much; and yet
how much it was to me! But how little for me to lose to save her from
the fate in store for her!

I can not hope to make clear to any one the tearing and rending in my
breast as the