p what
she had now and go back to being the little girl, deeply satisfied with
make-shift toys, which were only the foreshadowings of what was to come?
If she could, would she exchange her actual room at home, for this, even
to have again all the unquestioning trust in everyone and everything of
the child who had died in her heart? Would she choose to give up the
home where her living children had been born, at no matter what cost of
horrid pain to herself, and were growing up to no matter what dark
uncertainties in life, for this toy inhabited by paper-dolls? No, no,
she had gone on, gone on, and left this behind. Nor would she, if she
could, exchange the darker, heavier, richer gifts for the bright small
trinkets of the past.

All this ran fluently from her mind, with a swiftness and clarity which
seemed as shallow as it was rapid; but now there sounded in her ears a
warning roar of deeper waters to which this was carrying her.

Before she knew what was coming, she braced herself to meet it; and
holding hard and ineffectually, felt herself helplessly swept out and
flung to the fury of the waves . . . and she met them with an answering
tumult of welcome. That was what Vincent Marsh could do for her, wanted
to do for her,--that wonderful, miraculous thing,--give back to her
something she had thought she had left behind forever; he could take
her, in the strength of her maturity with all the richness of growth,
and carry her back to live over again the fierce, concentrated intensity
of newly-born passion which had come into her life, and gone, before she
had had the capacity to understand or wholly feel it. He could lift her
from the dulled routine of life beginning to fade and lose its colors,
and carry her back to the glorious forgetfulness of every created thing,
save one man and one woman.

She had had a glimpse of that, in the first year of her married life,
had had it, and little by little had lost it. It had crumbled away
insensibly, between her fingers, with use, with familiarity, with the
hateful blunting of sensitiveness which life's battering always brings.
But she could have it again; with a grown woman's strength and depth of
feeling, she could have the inheritance of youth. She had spent it, but
now she could have it again. That was what Vincent meant.

He seemed to lean over her now, his burning, quivering hand on hers. She
felt a deep hot flush rise to her face, all over her body. She was like
a crims