us than sin and repentance. It was either the continuance
of her old life in her father's house, which was the ignominious and
harmful one of the scapegoat, or this. She at last reveled in this. Here
she was mistress. Here what she did, she did, and what she did not do
remained undone. Here her silence was her invincible weapon. Here she
was free.

The soft summer night enveloped her. The air was sweet with flowers
and the grass which lay still unraked in her father's yard. A momentary
feeling of impatience seized her; then she dismissed it, and peace came.
What had she to do with that hay? Her father would be obliged to buy hay
if it were not raked over and dried, but what of that? She had nothing
to do with it.

She heard voices and soft laughter. A dark shadow passed along the
street. Her heart quickened its beat. The shadow turned in at her
father's gate. There was a babel of welcoming voices, of which Annie
could not distinguish one articulate word. She sat leaning forward, her
eyes intent upon the road. Then she heard the click of her father's gate
and the dark, shadowy figure reappeared in the road. Annie knew who it
was; she knew that Tom Reed was coming to see her. For a second, rapture
seized her, then dismay. How well she knew her sisters-how very well!
Not one of them would have given him the slightest inkling of the true
situation. They would have told him, by the sweetest of insinuations,
rather than by straight statements, that she had left her father's roof
and come over here, but not one word would have been told him concerning
her vow of silence. They would leave that for him to discover, to his
amazement and anger.

Annie rose and fled. She closed the door, turned the key softly, and ran
up-stairs in the dark. Kneeling before a window on the farther side from
her old home, she watched with eager eyes the young man open the gate
and come up the path between the old-fashioned shrubs. The clove-like
fragrance of the pinks in the border came in her face. Annie watched
Tom Reed disappear beneath the trellised hood of the door; then the bell
tinkled through the house. It seemed to Annie that she heard it as she
had never heard anything before. Every nerve in her body seemed urging
her to rise and go down-stairs and admit this young man whom she loved.
But her will, turned upon itself, kept her back. She could not rise
and go down; something stronger than her own wish restrained her. She
suffered horribly