ss an equal importance
with all other happenings large or small: for the events of her
individual experience had so distorted her perceptions of the ascending
values of life, that her own luckless pursuit of happiness appeared of
no greater importance in her eyes than the child, with the crooked back,
making her choice of sweets. Her own emotions, indeed, interested her no
longer, but she was aware of a dull curiosity concerning the crippled
child. Would her whole life become misshapen because of the physical
form which she wore like an outer garment? And she felt, at the thought,
that she would like to stand upon the side of the child and upon the
side of all who were oppressed and made miserable by the crookedness
either of the body or of destiny.

While this pity was still in her mind she tried to recall Kemper as she
had first known him, but it was to remember only that he had reddened
with anger as he spoke to her, and that the sunlight, falling upon him,
had revealed the gray hair on his temples. The physical aspect which had
meant so little in her love was all that the recollection of him could
suggest to her now, for she found that the visual memory still remained
after the passion which had informed it with life and colour was blotted
out.

The child interested her no longer, and walking on again, she passed,
after a time, the scattered houses, and came out upon the open road
which showed white and deserted beneath the stars. Looking overhead, as
she went on, her gaze swept the heavens with that sense of absolute
stillness which comes under the solitude of the sky, and standing
presently in the dust of the road, she fixed her eyes upon the Pleiades
shining softly far above the jagged line of the horizon. Her feet ached
beneath her, but her head seemed suddenly spinning through clear spaces
among the stars, and while she stood there, she felt that the distance
between her and the sky existed only in the hindrance of her body. With
that laid aside might she not recover her soul and God there as well as
here?

Again she went on, but this time she found that her limbs could make no
further effort, and struggling step by step, to a bend in the road, she
looked about her in a physical agony which left her consciousness only
of her desire for rest. A house, set back from the roadside in a clump
of trees, showed to her as she turned, and going through the little
whitewashed gate and up the path, she knocked at the d