ith this wish, but that he desired her in marriage had never once
entered her mind. He was a minister, and she reverenced his office,
and, besides, she considered herself but a girl, too ignorant and too
trivial to be the wife of one so high in holy service.

With the coming of the young professor a new force seemed entered upon
the saner side of her life. She recognized in him a master of the
great outer world--the Eastern world, the world of the unafraid--and
her determination to at least subordinate her "controls" had expanded
swiftly to a most dangerous height during the few hours of her
companionship with him. She felt that he would sympathize with
her--that he would help her. The clear positiveness of his speech, his
health, his humor, grew upon her each moment, and she resolved to
confide in him when next they met.

Part of this upspringing revolt, this antagonism, Clarke divined, and
the determination to arrest her purpose, the desire to possess her
entirely and at once, excluded every other wish or plan, and to feel
was to act with Anthony Clarke, for he was born to emotional
experience as the sparks fly upward. He had ever been a creature of
unreason, morbidly conscious of self--and naturally, for in him
struggled the blood of three races. His father was Scotch, and his
mother--Spanish on the spindle side and Irish by way of a most
mercurial father--remained an unsolved problem all her days, even to
her husband. Her laughter was as illogical as her tears. Her household
could never tell what the next hour would bring forth, so ready were
her sympathies, so instant her despairs. She lived all her life at the
heights or the depths, with never a day of serene, womanly, reasonable
action, and when she died her passing was of the same emotional
stress. She clung to earth like one whose body was about to drop into
soundless deeps.

Her son had inherited all her fervency, her inconstancy of purpose, as
well as her tendency to collapse under pressure. Physically he had
always been of slender figure, with weak lungs, and these weaknesses
he had used to free himself from work, from responsibility.

He was not a hypocrite--in that Britt was mistaken. He was by nature
deeply religious. His soul aspired, at times, to high things. He was
sympathetic to actual pain, and had always been morbidly in awe of
death. The sight of any poor, lost, and suffering man threw him into
instant, profound, and melancholy pity. A dead bee