d into the
man whom she was so proud to show as her capture,--a man far off from
Stephen Holmes. Brilliant she called him,--frank, winning, generous. She
thought she knew him well; held him a slave to her fluttering hand. Being
proud of her slave, she let the hand flutter down now somehow with some
flowers it held until it touched his hard fingers, her cheek flushing into
rose. The nerveless, spongy hand,--what a death-grip it had on his life!
He did not look back once at the motionless, dusty figure on the road.
What was that Polston had said about starving to death for a kind word?
_Love?_ He was sick of the sickly talk,--crushed it out of his heart with
a savage scorn. He remembered his father, the night he died, had said in
his weak ravings that God was love. Was He? No wonder, then, He was the
God of women, and children, and unsuccessful men. For him, he was done
with it. He was here with stronger purpose than to yield to weaknesses of
the flesh. He had made his choice,--a straight, hard path upwards; he was
deaf now and forever to any word of kindness or pity. As for this woman
beside him, he would be just to her, in justice to himself: she never
should know the loathing in his heart: just to her as to all living
creatures. Some little, mean doubt kept up a sullen whisper of bought and
sold,--sold,--but he laughed it down. He sat there with his head steadily
turned towards her: a kingly face, she called it, and she was right,--it
was a kingly face: with the same shallow, fixed smile on his mouth,--no
weary cry went up to God that day so terrible in its pathos, I think: with
the same dull consciousness that this was the trial night of his
life,--that with the homely figure on the road-side he had turned his back
on love and kindly happiness and warmth, on all that was weak and useless
in the world. He had made his choice; he would abide by it,--he would
abide by it. He said that over and over again, dulling down the
death-gnawing of his outraged heart.

Miss Herne was quite contented, sitting by him, with herself, and the
admiring world. She had no notion of trial nights in life. Not many
temptations pierced through her callous, flabby temperament to sting her
to defeat or triumph. There was for her no under-current of conflict, in
these people whom she passed, between self and the unseen power that
Holmes sneered at, whose name was love; they were nothing but movables,
pleasant or ugly to look at, well- or ill-dres