right way, neither too fast nor too slow, and all
chivalry and honor. Oh, my heart! my heart!" She was sobbing to herself.

There was a long pause.

"So you married him," Osmond reminded her.

"Osmond!" At last she had said his name. She knew it with her mind, but
how did her heart have it so ready? To him it seemed natural that she
should use it, until he thought of it next day. She continued in that
hurried voice that pleaded so, "I must make you see how I had thought of
those things always."

"What things, dear child?"

"Loving and being loved. It was like your plants, coming to flower.
There was to be one person who would give me a perfect devotion. There
would be music and dancing and bright weather, day after day, year after
year. That was coming to flower, like your plants."

"A rose in bloom!" he murmured.

"It was a kind of possession with me. I can't tell you what hold it took
on me. There were years when I tried not to have a wrong thought or do
an ugly act, so that I could be beautiful to him when he came."

"Behold, the bridegroom cometh!" mused the voice, in involuntary
comment, as if it responded to the man's own wondering mood.

"He came. He made himself irresistible to me. He knew my father first."

"Were they friends?"

"My father has no friends--not as you would understand it. He touches
people at one little point. They think they have everything; but it is
nothing. Still, they understood each other. My father sold me to him."

There was silence from the darkness under the tree; only she heard him
breathe.

"I was to blame, too," she cried. "But I did not see it then. I truly
did not see it. My father told me it was nobler and purer to go with my
lover so. Marriage, he said, had been profaned a million, million times.
Where was the sacrament, he asked, in a church that was all rotten? He
told me so, too--Tom Fulton. I went with him. I never married him." She
paused for the answering voice, but it delayed. The silence itself
constrained her to go on. "Do you know what Tom Fulton was?"

"He was a handsome beast."

"You never knew the half. But my father knew. He knew men. He knew Tom
Fulton. And he delivered me over to the snare of the fowler. I lived a
year with him. I left him. He had the accident, and I went back. He
died. I thanked God."

Osmond had not often, to his remembrance, formulated gratitude to any
great power, but he also said, "Thank God!" In a way he did not
understan