he yellow bowl.

"All the buttermilk is out of it," she answered, and thought of the
unfinished pair of purple slippers laid away in tissue paper upstairs in
her bureau drawer. As a married woman could she, with virtue, continue
to embroider slippers in pansies for her rector? These had been laid
aside on the day of her engagement to Abel, but she yearned now to riot
in purple shades with her needle. While she listened with a detached
mind to Abel's practical plans for the future, her only interest in
the details lay in the fact that they would, in a measure, insure the
possibility of a yearly offering of slippers. And while they looked into
each other's eyes, neither suspected for a moment the existence of a
secret chamber in the other's soul. All appeared plain and simple on the
surface, and Judy, as well as Abel, was honestly of the opinion that she
understood perfectly the situation and that the passionate refusal of
her heart was the only element that threatened the conventional security
of appearances.

She was in the morbid condition of mind when the capacity for feeling
seems concentrated on a single centre of pain. Her soul revolved in a
circle, and outside of its narrow orbit there was only the arid flatness
which surrounds any moment of vivid experience. The velvet slippers,
which might have been worn by the young clergyman, possessed a vital
and romantic interest in her thoughts, but the mill and the machinery
of which Abel was speaking showed to her merely as sordid and mechanical
details of existence.

Looking at her suddenly, he realized that she had heard nothing of what
he was saying. If he had looked deeper still he would have seen the
tragedy of her lovely little soul spinning the web of its perishing
illusion. Of all the martyrdoms allotted to love's victims, she was
enduring the bitterest, which is the martyrdom of frustration. Yet
because she appeared dull and undesirable on the surface, he had
declined, with the rest of Old Church, to regard her emotions any less
casually than he regarded her complexion.

"Well, I ought to be a proud man to have you, Judy," he remarked, and
rose to his feet.

"I hope neither of us will ever regret it," she returned.

"Not if I can help it," he said, and, putting his arm around her, he
drew her to him and kissed her lips. It was the second time he had
kissed her, and on the first occasion she had burst into hysterical
weeping. He did not know that it was the