freckled, black-haired slip of a little girl, with my frock torn and
my hands all scratched with the berry bushes."

She had begun by dramatising, but by now she was acting--acting with
all her histrionic power at fullest stretch, acting the part of a woman
unhappy amid luxuries, who looked back with regret and with longing
towards a joyous, simple childhood. She was sincere and she was not
sincere. Part of her--one of those two Laura Jadwins who at different
times, but with equal right called themselves "I," knew just what
effect her words, her pose, would have upon a man who sympathised with
her, who loved her. But the other Laura Jadwin would have resented as
petty, as even wrong, the insinuation that she was not wholly,
thoroughly sincere. All that she was saying was true. No one, so she
believed, ever was placed before as she was placed now. No one had ever
spoken as now she spoke. Her chin upon one slender finger, she went on,
her eyes growing wide:

"If I had only known then that those days were to be, the happiest of
my life.... This great house, all the beauty of it, and all this
wealth, what does it amount to?" Her voice was the voice of Phedre, and
the gesture of lassitude with which she let her arms fall into her lap
was precisely that which only the day before she had used to accompany
Portia's plaint of

--my little body is a-weary of this great world.

Yet, at the same time, Laura knew that her heart was genuinely aching
with real sadness, and that the tears which stood in her eyes were as
sincere as any she had ever shed.

"All this wealth," she continued, her head dropping back upon the
cushion of the chair as she spoke, "what does it matter; for what does
it compensate? Oh, I would give it all gladly, gladly, to be that
little black-haired girl again, back in Squire Dearborn's water lot;
with my hands stained with the whortle-berries and the nettles in my
fingers--and my little lover, who called me his beau-heart and bought
me a blue hair ribbon, and kissed me behind the pump house."

"Ah," said Corthell, quickly and earnestly, "that is the secret. It was
love--even the foolish boy and girl love--love that after all made your
life sweet then."

She let her hands fall into her lap, and, musing, turned the rings back
and forth upon her fingers.

"Don't you think so?" he asked, in a low voice.

She bent her head slowly, without replying. Then for a long moment
neither spoke. Laura played with