nced Palla and Ilse.

They came in as Marya swept the tattered scraps of paper into an
incense-bowl, dropped a lighted match upon them, and set the ancient
bronze vessel on the sill of the open window.

"Some of my vileness I am burning," she said, coming forward and
kissing Ilse on both cheeks.

Then, looking Palla steadily in the eyes, she bent forward and touched
her lips with her own.

"Nechevo," she said; "the thing that dwelt within me for a time has
continued on its way to hell, I hope."

She took the pale girl by both hands: "Do you understand?"

And Palla kissed her.

When they were seated: "What religious order would be likely to accept
me?" she asked serenely. And answered her own question: "None would
tolerate me--no order with its rigid systems of inquiry and its
merciless investigations.... And yet--I wonder.... Perhaps, as a
lay-sister in some missionary order--where few care to serve--where
life resembles death as one twin the other.... I don't know: I wonder,
Palla."

Palla asked her in a low voice if she had seen the afternoon paper.
Marya did not reply at once; but presently over her face a hot
rose-glow spread and deepened. Then, after a silence:

"The paper mentioned me as Vanya's wife. Is that what you mean? Yes; I
told them that.... It made no difference, for they would have
discovered it anyway. And I scarcely know why I made Vanya lie about
it to you all;--why I wished people to think otherwise.... Because I
have been married to Vanya since the beginning.... And I can not
explain why I have not told you."

She touched a rosebud in the vase that stood beside her, broke the
stem absently, and sat examining it in silence. And, after a few
moments:

"As a child I was too imaginative.... We do not change--we women.
Married, unmarried, too wise, or too innocent, we remain what we were
when our mothers bore us.... Whatever we do, we never change within:
we remain, in our souls, what we first were. And unaltered we die....
In morgue or prison or Potter's Field, where lies a dead female thing
in a tattered skirt, there, hidden somewhere under rag and skin and
bone, lies a dead girl-child."

She laid the unopened rosebud on Palla's knees; her preoccupied gaze
wandered around that silent, sunlit place.

"I could have taken my pistol," she said softly, "and I could have
killed a few among those whose doctrines at last slew Vanya.... Or I
could have killed myself."

She turned and her rem