te: Something Snapped]

Something seemed to snap, like the breaking of a strained tension.
Rosemary had come to the point where she could endure no more, and
mercifully the pain was eased. Later on, no doubt, she could suffer
again, but for the moment she felt only a dull weariness. In the
background the ache slumbered, like an ember that is covered with ashes,
but now she was at rest.

She looked about her curiously, as though she were a stranger. Yet, at
the very spot where she stood, Mrs. Lee had stood yesterday, her brown
eyes cold with controlled anger when she made her sarcastic farewell.
When she first saw her, she had been sitting on the log, where Alden
usually sat. Down in the hollow tree was the wooden box that held the
red ribbon. Shyly, the nine silver birches, with bowed heads, had turned
down the hillside and stopped. Across, on the other side of the hill,
where God hung His flaming tapestries of sunset from the high walls of
Heaven, Rosemary had stood that day, weeping, and Love had come to
comfort her.

[Sidenote: Another Standard]

None of it mattered now--nothing mattered any more. She had reached the
end, whatever the end might be. Seemingly it was a great pause of soul
and body, the consciousness of arrival at the ultimate goal.

When she saw Alden, she would ask to be released. She could tell him,
with some semblance of truth, that she could not leave Grandmother and
Aunt Matilda, because they needed her, and after they had done so much
for her, she could not bring herself to seem ungrateful, even for him.
The books were full of such things--the eternal sacrifice of youth to
age, which age unblushingly accepts, perhaps in remembrance of some
sacrifice of its own.

He had told her, long ago, that she was the only woman he knew. Now he
had another standard to judge her by and, at the best, she must fall far
short of it. Some day Alden would marry--he must marry, and have a home
of his own when his mother was no longer there to make it for him, and
she--she was not good enough for him, any more than Cinderella was good
enough for the Prince.

The fact that the Prince had considered Cinderella fully his equal
happily escaped Rosemary now. Clearly before her lay the one thing to be
done: to tell him it was all a mistake, and ask for freedom before he
forced it upon her. He had been very kind the other day, when she had
gone there to tea but, naturally, he had seen the difference--must have
seen