called it 'too much society.' And
then, without any warning, he asked me to marry him.

"That is why I came out here--to think it over. I didn't love him, and I
told him so, but I respected him.

"He never compromised in his art, and I have known him over and over to
refuse houses because certain conditions were stipulated. To marry him
was an acknowledgment of defeat. I realized that. But I had come to the
extremity where I wanted peace--peace and protection. I wanted to put
myself irrevocably beyond the old life, which simply could not have gone
on, and I saw myself in the advancing years becoming tawdry and worn,
losing little by little what I had gained at a price.

"So I came here--to reflect, to see, as it were, if I could find
something left in me to take hold of, to build upon, to begin over again,
perhaps, by going back to the old associations. I could think of no
better place, and I knew that my father would, be going away after a few
weeks, and that I should be lone, yet with an atmosphere back of me,--my
old atmosphere. That was why I went to church the first Sunday, in order
to feel more definitely that atmosphere, to summon up more completely the
image of my mother. More and more, as the years have passed, I have
thought of her in moments of trouble. I have recovered her as I never
had hoped to do in Mr. Bentley. Isn't it strange," she exclaimed
wonderingly, "that he should have come into both our lives, with such an
influence, at this time?"

"And then I met you, talked to you that afternoon in the garden. Shall I
make a complete confession? I wrote to Jennings Howe that very week that
I could not marry him."

"You knew!" Hodder exclaimed: "You knew then?"

"Ah, I can't tell what I knew--or when. I knew, after I had seen you,
that I couldn't marry him! Isn't that enough?"

He drew in his breath deeply.

"I should be less than a man if I refused to take you, Alison. And--no
matter what happens, I can and will find some honest work to support you.
But oh, my dear, when I think of it, the nobility and generosity of what
you have done appalls me."

"No, no!" she protested, "you mustn't say that! I needed you more than
you need me. And haven't we both discovered the world, and renounced it?
I can at least go so far as to say that, with all my heart. And isn't
marriage truer and higher when man and wife start with difficulties and
problems to solve together? It is that thought that brings me the
grea