ving the two
men from the grounds. I understood what had happened. After you went
into the house again my mother and I saw you watching by your window.
I was sorry that you were so deeply disturbed.

"Because what had occurred did not cause me any anxiety whatever."

"Do you mean," he said hoarsely, "that the probability of your name
being coupled with mine and dragged through the public mire does not
disconcert you?"

"No."

"Why not? Is it because your clairvoyance reassures you as to the
outcome of all this?"

"Dear," she said, gently, "I know no more of the outcome than you do.
I know nothing more concerning our future than do you--excepting,
only, that we shall journey toward it together, and through it to the
end, accomplishing the destiny which links us each to the other.... I
know no more than that."

"Then why are you so serene under the menace of this miserable affair?
For myself I care nothing; I'd thank God for a divorce on any terms.
But you--dearest--dearest!--I cannot endure the thought of you
entangled in such a shameful--"

"Where is the shame, Clive? The real shame, I mean. In me there are
two selves; neither have, as yet, been disgraced by any disobedience
of any law framed by men for women. Nor shall I break men's
laws--under which women are governed without their own consent--unless
no other road to our common destiny presents itself for me to
follow."... She smiled, watching his intent and sombre face:

"Don't fear for me, dear. I have come to understand what life is, and
I mean to live it, wholesomely, gloriously, uncrippled in body and
mind, unmaimed by folk-ways and by laws as ephemeral--" she turned
toward the open windows--"as those frail-winged things that float in
the sunshine above Spring Pond, yonder, born at sunrise, and at
sundown dead."

She laughed, leaning there on her dimpled elbows, stripping a peach of
its velvet skin:

"The judges of the earth,--and the power of them!--What is it, dear,
compared to the authority of love! To-day men have their human will of
men, judging, condemning, imprisoning, slaying, as the moral fashion
of the hour dictates. To-morrow folk-ways change; judge and victim
vanish along with fashions obsolete--both alike, their brief reign
ended.

"For judge and victim are awake at last; and in the twinkling of an
eye, the old world has become a memory or a shrine for those tranquil
pilgrims who return to worship for a while where love lies
sleepin