ne, she felt so little like it. But there
was no hope of that. There was a rough seat cut in the stone on the
other side; the views landward and seaward were delightful; the great
elm near by shaded the place, and Bulchester had probably ensconced
himself there with somebody else. She must go by, and if they even
joined her, it was no matter. She made a movement forward, when
Edrnonson's voice with a ring that she had never heard in it came to her
ears. Yet it was not his tones, but his words, that made her cower and
stand motionless with startled eyes and parted lips, until, slowly, as
wonder grew into disgust, her face crimsoned from brow to throat and
drooped, as if to hide from itself. Was this the way that men spoke of
women, with sneers, with scoffing? In all her innocent life she had
never looked even through bars at the world that such expressions
revealed, dimly enough to her veiled in her simplicity.

The Puritan spirit of her country, that although it sometimes put bands
on the freeman, chained the brute in human nature in his dungeon, lest
his breath in the land should breed death, had been in such accord with
her own fair womanhood that she had not realized that all the world was
not as safe as her own home, as safe, though not as happy. Yet the sneer
that Edmonson had spoken seemed to him so slight, so much a matter of
course, that it was forgotten as soon as uttered; it was merely his way
of looking at a world unknown to his listener. She did not know of what
woman it was that he had dared to speak with such contempt; probably of
some one she had never seen. It was not at the stranger alone; it was
through her at all women that the mire of suspicion had been thrown.

She could not go forward now, and while she stood trying to grow calm
through her indignation and seeing that she must go home by the other
road, which would take her quite a distance out of her way, scraps of
the conversation that fell upon her ears found lodgment in her mind. The
two seemed to be talking of some man now. Then all at once she heard
Bulchester say:

"It's the oddity that takes you;"--she had lost what went before--"that
will soon wear off. But I'm glad enough you're not as wise as I, to
prefer the other. What makes you so sure, though, that he has secured
your--?" In some movement she lost the last word and the answer, unless
it were merely a significant exclamation of belief. "You wouldn't stand
upon the chances of change