eg my bread than be their pensioner. No, no; you entirely
mistake the situation. I shall have no dealings with them at all--no
nonsense about arbitration or private arrangements. I won't give them
any opportunity of feeling generous. It must"--she spoke very slowly and
looked at him fiercely--"with me it must be all or nothing, and"--she
got up suddenly and began smoothing her gloves over her wrists--"and as
I don't choose to starve it must be all. But if I can't go through with
it (which is quite possible) I shall throw up the sponge and get out of
this world as quickly as possible."

"If you have made up your mind," said Mark sternly, "to defy God, in
Whom I know that you believe, to defy the laws of man, whose punishment
_may_ come, whereas His punishment must come, why have you told me all
this?"

"I had to tell some one; I was suffocating. You don't know"--she stood
looking out of the window a strange expression of hunger and loneliness
succeeding the fierceness of a few moments before--"you don't know what
it is to have in your own mind a long, long story about yourself that
has never been told. To have been lonely and hardly treated and deceived
and spurned, and never to have put your own case to any one human being!
To have cried from childhood till twenty-two, knowing that nobody really
cared! There comes a time when you would rather say the worst of
yourself than keep silence. To accuse yourself is the natural thing;
silence is the unnatural thing."

"Good God!" said Mark, rising, "don't stop there. If you must accuse
yourself, pass judgment also. Class yourself where you have chosen with
your eyes open to stand. Would you allow any amount of provocation and
unhappiness to excuse a systematic fraud? Do you think that the thief
brought up to sin has less or more excuse than you have? Are you the
only person who has known a lonely childhood? Can you tell me here in
this room that God never showed you what love really is? He has never
left you alone, and you wish in vain now that He would leave you alone.
For your present life is so unbearable that you feel that you may
choose death rather than go on with it."

"I shall pay heavily for the relief of speech if I am to have a sermon
preached all to myself," said Molly insolently. "I was speaking of the
need of human love; I was speaking of all I had suffered, and it is easy
for you to retort upon me that I might have had Divine Love only that I
chose to reject