e," she added. "To say nothing of the
bawbees, as Mr. Crozier calls money. Well, we are ready. It all depends
on you now, Mrs. Crozier."

"No, not all."

"He used to be afraid of you; now you are afraid of him," said Kitty, as
though stating a commonplace.

There was no more shrewishness left in the little woman to meet this
chastisement. The forces against her were too many. Loneliness and the
long struggle to face the world without her man; the determination of
this masterful young woman who had been so long a part of her husband's
life; and, more than all, a new feeling altogether--love, and the
dependence a woman feels, the longing to find rest in strong arms, which
comes with the first revelation of love, had conquered what Kitty had
called her "bossiness." She was now tremulous before the crisis which
she must presently face. Pride in her fortune, in her independence, had
died down in her. She no longer thought of herself as a woman especially
endowed and privileged. She took her fortune now like a man; for she had
been taught that a man could set her aside just because she had money,
could desert her to be independent of it. It had been a revelation to
her, and she was chastened of all the termagancy visible and invisible
in her. She stood now before Kitty of "a humble and a contrite heart,"
and made no reply at all to the implied challenge. Kitty, instantly
sorry for what she had said, let it go at that. She was only now aware
of how deeply her arrows had gone home.

As they stood silent there was a click at the gate. Kitty ran into
Crozier's room, thrust the letter into its pigeonhole in the desk, and
in a moment was back again. In the garden the Young Doctor was holding
Crozier in conversation, but watching the front door. So soon, however,
as Kitty had shown herself, as she had promised, at the front door and
then vanished, he turned Crozier towards the house again by an adroit
word, and left him at the door-step.

Seeing who was inside the room Crozier hesitated, and his long face,
with paleness added to its asceticism, took on a look which could have
given no hope of happiness to Mona. It went to her heart as no look of
his had ever gone. Suddenly she had a revelation of how little she
had known of what he was, or what any man was or could be, or of those
springs of nature lying far below the outer lives which move in orbits
of sheltering convention. It is because some men and women are so
sheltered f