nts."

"As if the poor people could wait! Oh, it's cruel, cruel of you to go!"

Her voice broke in a throb of entreaty that went to his inmost fibres.

"You don't understand. It's impossible in the present state of things
that I should do any good by staying."

"Then you refuse? Even if I were to insist on their asking you to stay,
you would still refuse?" she persisted.

"Yes--I should still refuse."

She made no answer, but moved a few steps nearer to the edge of the
wood. The meadow was just below them now, and the sleigh in plain sight
on the height beyond. Their steps made no sound on the sodden drifts
underfoot, and in the silence he thought he heard a catch in her
breathing. It was enough to make the brimming moment overflow. He stood
still before her and bent his head to hers.

"Bessy!" he said, with sudden vehemence.

She did not speak or move, but in the quickened state of his perceptions
he became aware that she was silently weeping. The gathering darkness
under the trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy
background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of
pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging
the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest
impression was the sweet sense of her tears.

"Bessy!" he exclaimed again; and as he drew a step nearer he felt her
yield to him, and bury her sobs against his arm.

BOOK II

IX

"BUT, Justine----"

Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness of her Oak Street
drawing-room, and harmonizing by her high lights and hard edges with the
white-and-gold angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking eye
on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in a glass bowl the
handful of roses she had just brought in from the garden.

Mrs. Dressel's intonation made it clear that the entrance of Miss Brent
had been the signal for renewing an argument which the latter had
perhaps left the room to escape.

"When you were here three years ago, Justine, I could understand your
not wanting to go out, because you were in mourning for your mother--and
besides, you'd volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope
Hospital. But now that you've come back for a rest and a change I can't
imagine why you persist in shutting yourself up--unless, of course," she
concluded, in a higher key of reproach, "it's because you think so
little of Hanaford society----"