to fill her pan with
raspberries. She traced her steps down the hill and up through the
glades of the bluff wherever the ripe raspberries were hanging. She came
to the minute when her stage directions called for "Lord Gregory," and
she sang it with the same thin, silvery piping which was all she could
contribute now to the demand of drama. It was both an annoyance and a
surprise to hear a footfall and the swish of robes and to turn and see
Lois Willoughby.

Beyond the fact that she couldn't help it, she didn't know why she
became at once so taciturn and repellent. "Oh, she'll come again," she
said in self-excuse, and with vague ideas of atonement, after Lois had
gone away. Besides, the things that Lois had said in the way of
solicitude, sympathy, and God made no appeal to her. If she felt regret
it was from obscure motives of compassion, since this woman, too, had
missed what was best in love.

She would have returned to her dream had her dream returned to her; but
Lois had broken the spell. Rosie could no longer get the ecstasies of
re-enactment. Re-enactment itself became a foolish thing, the husk of
what had once been fruit. It was a new phase of loss. Everything went
but her misery and her desire to strike at Claude--that and the sense
that whatever she did, and no matter how elusive she made herself, she
would have to go back to the old life at last. She struggled against the
conviction, but it settled on her like a mist. She played again with the
raspberry-bine, she sang "Lord Gregory," she peered over the brink of
the toy precipice--but she evoked nothing. She stood as close to the
edge of the cliff as she dared, whipping and lashing and taunting her
imagination by the rashness of the act. Nothing came but the commonplace
suggestion that even if she fell in, the boat which had appeared on the
lake, and from which two men were fishing, would rescue her. The worst
she would get would be a wetting and perhaps a cold. She wouldn't drown.

Common sense took possession of her. The thing for her to do, it told
her cruelly, was to go back and pick the cucumbers. After that there
would be some other job. In the market-garden business jobs were
endless, especially in spring. She could set about them with a better
heart since, after all that had happened, Archie Masterman couldn't
refuse now to renew the lease. He wouldn't have the face to refuse
it--so common sense expressed itself--when his son had done her such a
wron