ered her youth. Now her youth
seemed to drink eagerly a cup of obedience--as though it were the wine
of life itself. She even longed to obey the voice whispering in her soul
from ever so far away: "Close--close to him! Home is in his arms."

With all her unconscious revelation of herself, however, there was that
in her which was pure maidenliness. For, married as she was, she had
never in any real sense been a wife, or truly understood what wifedom
meant, or heard in her heart the call of the cradle. She had been the
victim of possession, which had meant no more to her than to be, as it
were, subjected daily to the milder tortures of the Inquisition.

Yet she knew and could realize to the full that a power which had her
in control, which possessed her by the rights of the law, prevented
her--and would prevent her by whatever torture was possible--from
friendship, alliance, or whatever it might be, with Orlando. She knew
the law: one wife to one husband; and the wife to look neither to the
right nor to the left, to the east nor to the west, to the north nor to
the south, but to remain, and be constant in remaining, the helpmeet,
the housewife, the sole property of her husband, no matter what that
husband might be--vinous, vicious, vagrant, vengeful or any other
things, good or bad.

"Why don't you look glad when you see me come in?" Joel Mazarine
remarked to her suddenly the day before. "If you'd had some husbands,
you might have reason for bein' the statue and the dummy you are. Am I a
drunkard? Am I a thief? Am I a nighthawk? Do I go off lookin' for other
women? Don't I keep the commandments? Ain't you got a home here as good
as any in the land? Didn't I take you out of poverty, and make you head
of all this, with people to wait on you and all the rest of it?"

That was the way he had talked, and somehow she had not seemed able to
bear it; and she had said to him, in unexpected revolt, that her tongue
was her own, and what was in her mind was her own, even if her body
wasn't.

Then, in a fury, he had caught his riding-whip from the wall to lash her
with it, just when Li Choo the Chinaman appeared with a message which he
delivered at the appropriate moment, though he had had it to deliver
for some time. It was to the effect that the Clerk of the Court in
the neighbouring town of Waterway wished to see him at once on urgent
business. The message had been left by a rancher in passing.

As Li Choo delivered the word,