elf without it. "Facts
are all I have had to do with."

She seemed like a bewildered creature flying about in a confined space.

"You wouldn't say what my father does," she concluded miserably. "You
wouldn't feel we have a right to the higher truth, if we feel great
desires, great hungers the world wouldn't understand?"

"I only know about facts," said Osmond again. "You see, I work in my
garden all day, nearly every day in the year. I know I must sow good
seed. I must nourish it. I know nature can't lie. I didn't suppose
things were so incomprehensible out in the world--or so hard."

"Haven't they been hard for you?"

"For me!" He caught his breath, and immediately she knew how the
question touched him. It was as monstrous as his fate. But he answered
immediately and with a gentleness without reproach,--

"Things are different for me in every way. But I should have thought you
would reign over them like a queen."

"A queen! I have been a slave all my life. I see it now. A slave to
other people's passions--Tom Fulton's cruelty, my father's greed."

"His greed for money? I don't always understand you when you speak of
him."

"For money, power, everything that makes up life. My father is one great
hunger. Give him the world and he would eat it up."

Images crowded upon her. It seemed to her that here in the silence, with
the spaces of the dark about her and that voice answering, her thought
was generated like the lightning.

"Do you see," she asked suddenly, "how I blame those two men, and not
myself? I am the sinner. The sinner ought to own his sin. I don't know
whether I have sinned or not. I believed in love, and because I believed
in it, those two men betrayed me. That was how I was taught not to
believe in anything."

"Don't you believe any more?"

"Oh, I don't know! I don't know!" It was a despairing cry. "There is
kindness, I know that. Peter is kind. Your grandmother is the kindest
person in the world. But that one thing I dreamed about--why, Osmond,
that one thing was the most beautiful thing God ever made."

"Tell me more about it."

"You have thought about it, too. We can't be so much alike, you and I,
and not have thought the same things."

"Are we alike?"

It was a wistful voice. She laughed, a little sorry laugh.

"Well," she said, "at least we are in our playhouse together."

"Ah!" He seemed to speak in spite of prudence. "That's not because we
are alike. It is because we are differe