shade of wistful wonder
if perhaps all this did not mean that she might be sliding from the
ranks of those who feel and do, into the ranks of those who only
understand.

But one glance at the life that lay before her scattered this hanging
mist-cloud . . . good heavens! what feeling and doing lay there before
her!

Had she thought that Neale was nothing to her because he had become all
in all to her so that he penetrated all her life, so that she did not
live an instant alone? Had she thought the loss of the amusing trinket
of physical newness could stand against the gain of an affection ill
massy gold? Would she, to buy moments of excitement, lose an instant of
the precious certainty of sympathy and trust and understanding which she
and Neale had bought and paid for, hour by hour, year by year of honest
life-in-common? Where was real life for her? Had she not known? Where
were the real depths, where the real food for the whole woman she had
grown to be? Neale had opened the door so that she could go away from
him if that was what she needed, or go back to stand by his side; and
through the open door had come the flood of daylight which had shown her
that she could not go back to stand by his side because she had been
there all the time, had never left it, never could leave it, any more
than she could leave half of her body in one place, and go on to
another.

II

There was other feeling and doing now, too, before her, this instant,
which she had forgotten, idling here in her much-loved forest, as much a
part of her home as her piano or her own roof-tree. She had been trying
to understand what had been happening that summer. Let her try first of
all to understand what she must do in that perfectly definite and
concrete dilemma in which she had been placed by that strange sight of
'Gene Powers, fleeing back from the Eagle Rocks. She must look squarely
at what she supposed was the legal obligation . . . she instantly felt a
woman's impatience of the word legal as against human, and could not
entertain the thought of the obligations of the situation. She must see,
and think and try to understand, with Neale to help her. She had not yet
had time to tell Neale.

But not today. Today she was only the bearer of the good tidings to
Nelly and 'Gene, tidings which would wipe out for her the recollection
of a day which was shameful to her, the day when she had conceived the
possibility of believing some thing base against