love with somebody
else."

"And that was----?"

"He supposed your mother to be a widow. Well, if you won't come, I shall
go alone and read my 'L'Allegro' under the boughs, with breezes blowing
between the lines. I can show you some little field-mice like unfledged
birds, and a nest that protrudes now and then glittering eyes and cleft
fangs."

Marguerite was silent; the latter commodity was _de trop_. Mrs. Purcell
adjusted her parasol and passed on.

Here, then, was the whole affair. Marguerite pressed her hands to her
forehead, as if fearful some of the swarming thoughts should escape;
then she hastened up the slope behind the house, and entered and hid
herself in the woods. Mr. Raleigh had loved her mother. Of course, then,
there was not a shadow of doubt that her mother had loved him. Horrible
thought! and she shook like an aspen, beneath it. For a time it seemed
that she loathed him,--that she despised the woman who had given him
regard. The present moment was a point of dreadful isolation; there was
no past to remember, no future to expect; she herself was alone and
forsaken, the whole world dark, and heaven blank. But that could not be
forever. As she sat with her face buried in her hands, old words, old
looks, flashed on her recollection; she comprehended what long years of
silent suffering the one might have endured, what barren yearning the
other; she saw how her mother's haughty calm might be the crust on a
lava-sea; she felt what desolation must have filled Roger Raleigh's
heart, when he found that she whom he had loved no longer lived, that he
had cherished a lifeless ideal,--for Marguerite knew from his own lips
that he had not met the same woman whom he had left.

She started up, wondering what had led her upon this train of thought,
why she had pursued it, and what reason she had for the pain it gave
her. A step rustled among the distant last-year's leaves; there in the
shadowy wood, where she did not dream of concealing her thoughts, where
it seemed that all Nature shared her confidence, this step was like
a finger laid on the hidden sore. She paused, a glow rushed over her
frame, and her face grew hot with the convicting flush. Consternation,
bitter condemnation, shame, impetuous resolve, swept over her in one
torrent, and she saw that she had a secret which every one might touch,
and, touching, cause to sting. She hurried onward through the wood,
unconscious how rapidly or how far her heedless c