r face and neck. The unchanged eyes of Joan under her broad
brows looked up at him. She was thin and wan, unbelievably broken and
tired and hurt, but she was Joan. Pierre could not but forget death at
sight of her. He staggered forward, and she, putting up her arms, drew
him hungrily and let fall her head upon his shoulder.

"My gel! My Joan!" Pierre sobbed.

Prosper's voice sawed into their tremulous silence.

"So, after all, the branding iron is the proper instrument," he said.
"A man can always recognize his estray, and when she is recognized she
will come to heel."

Joan pushed Pierre from her violently and turned upon Prosper Gael.
Her voice broke over him in a tumult of soft scorn.

"You know nothing of loving, Prosper Gael, not the first letter of
loving. Nobody has learned that about you as well as I have. Now,
listen and I will teach you something. This is something that _I_ have
learned. There are worse wounds than I had from Pierre, and it is by
the hands of such men as you are that they are given. The hurts you
get from love, they heal. Pierre was mad, he was a beast, he branded
me as though I had been a beast. For long years I couldn't think of
him but with a sort of horror in my heart. If it hadn't been for you,
I might never have thought of him no other way forever. But what you
did to me, Prosper, you with your white-hot brain and your gray-cold
heart, you with your music and your talk throbbing and talking and
whining about my soul, what you did to me has made Pierre's iron a
very gentle thing. I have not acted in the play you wrote, the play
you made out of me and my unhappiness, without understanding just what
it was that you did to me. Perhaps if it hadn't been for the play, I
might even have believed that you were capable of something better
than that passion you had once for me--but not now. Never now can I
believe it. What you make other people suffer is material for your own
success and you delight in it. You make notes upon it. Pierre was mad
through loving me, too ignorantly, too jealously, but what you did to
me was through loving me too little. That was a brand upon my brain
and soul. Sometimes since then that scar on my shoulder has seemed to
me almost like the memory of a caress. I went away from Pierre,
leaving him for dead, ready for death myself. When you left me, you
left me alive and ready for what sort of living? It has been Pierre's
love and his following after me that have kept