d her for an instant.

"But you started to tell me more about him, I'm sure, at first,"
Bedient said. The idea in his brain needed this.

"I helped him in his studies," she answered angrily. There was
something morbid to her in Bedient's intensity. "I helped him in the
world, or friends of mine did. Yes, I made his way among men until he
could stand alone. And he did, quickly. He was bright. Even his
refinements of dress and manner and English--I undertook at the
beginning."

Half-dead she had fallen into the old current, not comprehending a
tithe of his suffering.

"Oh, I put love into it!" she said dully. "I thought it the most
glorious work I ever did."

"You tell me wonderfully about yourself, Beth, with these few
sentences.... There is nothing finer in my comprehension than the
mother-spirit in the maid which makes her love the boy or the man whom
she lifts and inspires."

The cool idealist had returned. Beth did not welcome him.

"I believe that every achievement which lifts a man above his fellows
is energized by some woman's outpouring heart. She bestows brave and
beautiful things of her own, working in the dark, until the hour of his
test, as those fine straws of the Tropics are woven under water----"

"And what mockery to find," she finished coldly, "after you have woven
and woven, that the fabric finally brought to light is streaky and
imperfect."

Bedient's business of the moment was to learn if she were right in
being as she said, "inexorable"; if she did not sometimes think that a
finely-human heart might have come since to that flashing exterior,
which had filled the girlish eyes. He could only draw from the whole
savage darkness that the Other still lived in her heart.

"But he will not stay forgotten--is that it, Beth?"

Into the cold gray light of her mind, came a curious parable that had
occurred to her, as they started out to ride this morning, before the
great moments of high noon. And thus she related it to Bedient in the
hatred which filled her, last of all from his imperturbable coolness:

"I saddled a great deal, even as a girl. In New York, years ago, the
desire came to possess a horse of my own. I bought a beautiful bay
colt, pure saddle-bred, rare to look upon; but something always went
wrong with him. He galled, threw a shoe and went lame, stumbled,
invariably did the unexpected, and often the dangerous, thing. Truly he
was brand new every morning. I worried as if he were a ch