d
sooner see you dead at my feet than that you should break your word to
Mary."

James laughed.

"And you, mother?" he asked, lightly.

She did not answer, but looked at him earnestly.

"What, you too? Would you rather see me dead than not married to Mary?
What a bloodthirsty pair you are!"

James, laughing, spoke so gaily, it never dawned on them that his words
meant more than was obvious; and yet he felt that they, loving but
implacable, had signed his death-warrant. With smiling faces they had
thrown open the portals of that House, and he, smiling, was ready to
enter.

Mary at that moment came in, followed by Uncle William.

"Well, Jamie, there you are!" she cried, in that hard, metallic voice
which to James betrayed so obviously the meanness of her spirit and her
self-complacency. "Where on earth have you been?"

She stood by the table, straight, uncompromising, self-reliant; by her
immaculate virtue, by the strength of her narrow will, she completely
domineered the others. She felt herself capable of managing them all,
and, in fact, had been giving Uncle William a friendly little lecture
upon some action of which she disapproved. Mary had left off her summer
things and wore again the plain serge skirt, and because it was rainy,
the battered straw hat of the preceding winter. She was using up her old
things, and having got all possible wear out of them, intended on the
day before her marriage generously to distribute them among the poor.

"Is my face very red?" she asked. "There's a lot of wind to-day."

To James she had never seemed more unfeminine; that physical repulsion
which at first had terrified him now was grown into an ungovernable
hate. Everything Mary did irritated and exasperated him; he wondered she
did not see the hatred in his eyes as he looked at her, answering her
question.

"Oh, no," he said to himself, "I would rather shoot myself than marry
you!"

His dislike was unreasonable, but he could not help it; and the devotion
of his parents made him detest her all the more; he could not imagine
what they saw in her. With hostile glance he watched her movements as
she took off her hat and arranged her hair, grimly drawn back and
excessively neat; she fetched her knitting from Mrs. Parsons's
work-basket and sat down. All her actions had in them an insufferable
air of patronage, and she seemed more than usually pleased with herself.
James had an insane desire to hurt her, to ruffle that
se