descending
gloom, the gentle freedom of the placid harbor, the revolt of her
usually yielding lover, deepened it into something more acute.

"Mellony," said her mother, with a touch of that timidity which appeared
only in her speech with her daughter, "did you count on going over to
the Neck to-morrow, as you promised?"

"I'll never count on doing anything again," said Mellony, in a voice she
tried to make cold and even, but which vibrated notwithstanding,--"never,
so long as I live. I'll never think, or plan, or--or speak, if I can
help it--of what I mean to do. I'll never do anything but just work and
shut my eyes and--and live, if I've got to!" Her voice broke, and she
turned her head away from the open window and looked straight before her
into the shadowed room. Her mother moved uneasily, and her knotted hands
grasped the arms of the stiff chair in which she sat.

"Mellony," she said again, "you've no call to talk so."

"I've no call to talk at all. I've no place anywhere. I'm not anybody. I
haven't any life of my own." The keen brutality of the thoughtlessness
of youth, and its ignoring of all claims but those of its own happiness,
came oddly from the lips of submissive Mellony. Mrs. Pember quivered
under it.

"You know you're my girl, Mellony," she answered gently. "You're all
I've got."

"Yes," the other answered indifferently, "that's all I am,--Mellony
Pember, Mrs. Pember's girl,--just that."

"Ain't that enough? Ain't that something to be,--all I plan for and work
for? Ain't that enough for a girl to be?"

Mellony turned her eyes from emptiness, and fixed them upon her mother's
face, dimly outlined in the vagueness.

"Is that all you've been," she asked, "just somebody's daughter?"

It was as if a heavy weight fell from her lips and settled upon her
mother's heart. There was a silence. Mellony's eyes, though she could
not see them, seemed to Mrs. Pember to demand an answer in an
imperative fashion unlike their usual mildness.

"It's because I've been,--it's because I'd save you from what I have
been that I--do as I do. You know that," she said.

"I don't want to be saved," returned the other, quickly and sharply.

The older woman was faced by a situation she had never dreamed of,--a
demand to be allowed to suffer! The guardian had not expected this from
her carefully shielded charge.

"I want you to have a happy life," she added.

"A happy life!" flashed the girl. "And you're keeping me from