crying for her mother,
and her mother was suffering tortures all that time. Then I kept it
secret all these years. You didn't know what I have suffered,
Lyman."

Cynthia regarded him with a wan look.

Risley half laughed, then checked himself. "My poor girl, you have
the New England conscience in its worst form," he said.

"You yourself told me it was a serious thing I was doing," Cynthia
said, half resentfully. "One does not wish one's sin treated lightly
when one has hugged its pricks to one's bosom for so long--it
detracts from the dignity of suffering."

"So I did, but all those years ago!"

"If you don't leave me my remorse, how can I atone for the deed?"

"Cynthia, you are horribly morbid."

"Maybe you are right, maybe it is worse than morbid. Sometimes I
think I am unnatural, out of drawing, but I did not make myself, and
how can I help it?" Cynthia spoke with a pathetic little laugh.

She leaned her head back in her chair, and looked at a star through
a gap in the vines. The shadows of the leaves played over her long,
white figure. Again to Risley, gazing at her, came the conviction as
of subtle spiritual deformity in the woman; she was unnatural in
something the same fashion that an orchid is unnatural, and it was
worse, because presumably the orchid does not know it is an orchid
and regret not being another, more evenly developed, flower, and
Cynthia had a full realization and a mental mirror clear enough to
see the twist in her own character.

Risley had never kissed her in his life, but that night, when they
parted, he laid a hand on her soft, gray hair, and smoothed it back
with a masculine motion of tenderness, leaving her white forehead,
which had a candid, childish fulness about the temples, bare. Then
he put his lips to it.

"You are a silly girl, Cynthia," he said.

"I wish I were different, Lyman," she responded, and, he felt, with
a double meaning.

"I don't," he said, and stroked her hair with a great tenderness,
which seemed for the time to quite fill and satisfy his heart. He
was a man of measureless patience, born to a firm conviction of the
journey's end.

"There are worse things than loving a good woman your whole life and
never having her," he said to himself as he went home, but he said
it without its full meaning. Risley's "nerves" were always lighted
by the lamp of his own hope, which threw a gleam over unknown seas.

Chapter XXVI

Robert Lloyd accompanied Elle