g. If she had scored no other victory, her suffering would at least
have secured that.

It was an argument of which she couldn't but feel the weight. There
would be three more years of just managing to live--three more years of
sowing and planting and watering and watching, at the end of which they
would not quite have starved, while Matt would have had a hole in which
to hide himself on coming out of jail. Decidedly it was an argument. She
had already shown her willingness to sell herself; and this would
apparently prove to be her price.

Wearily, when noon had passed and afternoon set in, she got herself to
her feet. Wearily she began to descend the hill. She would go back again
to the cucumbers. She would take up again the burden she had thrown
down. She would bring her wild heart into harness and tame it to
hopelessness. Common sense could suggest nothing else.

She went now by the path, because it was tortuous and less direct than
the bee-line over fern. She paused at every excuse--now to watch a robin
hopping, now to look at a pink lady's-slipper abloom in a bed of
spleenwort, now for no reason at all. Each step cost her a separate act
of renunciation; each act of renunciation was harder than the other. But
successive steps and successive acts brought her down the hill at last.

"I can't. I can't."

She dragged herself a few paces farther still.

"I can't! I can't!"

She was in sight of the boulevard, where a gang of Finns were working,
and beyond which lay the ragged, uncultivated outskirts of her father's
land. Up through a tangle of nettles and yarrow she could see the zigzag
path which had been the rainbow bridge of her happiness. She came to a
dead stop, the back of her hand pressed against her mouth fearfully. "If
I go up there," she said to herself, "I shall never come down again."
She meant that she would never come down again in the same spirit. That
spirit would be captured and slain. She herself would be captured and
slain. Nothing would live of her but a body to drudge in the hothouse to
earn a few cents a day.

Suddenly, without forming a resolution or directing an intention, she
turned and sped up the hill. At first she only walked rapidly; but the
walk broke into a run, and the run into a swift skimming along through
the trees like that of a roused partridge.

And yet she didn't know what she was running from. Something within her,
a power of guardedness or that capacity for common sense w