seized her arm. "No, not now," he said firmly. "You shall not go now.
Wait until daylight. She will listen to you more coolly then."

She resisted him. "Why?" she said. "Why?"

"People fancy things at night," he urged. "I know it is so. If she saw
you enter out of the darkness"--the girl with her burning eyes, her wet
cheeks, her disordered hair looked wild enough--"she might refuse to
believe you. Besides----"

"What?"

"I will not have you go now," he said firmly. That instant it had
flashed upon him that one of the faces he had seen outside was the face
of the dead child's mother. "I will not let you go," he repeated. "Go in
the daylight. Go to-morrow morning. Go then, if you will!" He did not
choose to tell her that he feared for her instant safety if she went
now; that, if he had his will, the streets would see her no more for
many a day.

She gave way. She took off her hood, and laid it on the table. But for
several minutes she stood, brooding darkly and stormily, her hands
fingering the strings. To foresee is not always to be forearmed. She had
lived for months in daily and hourly expectation of the blow which had
fallen; but not the more easily for that could she brook the concrete
charge. Her heart burned, her soul was on fire. Justice, give us justice
though the heavens fall, is an instinct planted deep in man's nature! Of
the Mysterious Passion of our Lord our finite minds find no part worse
than the anguish of innocence condemned. A child? She to hurt a child?
And her mother? Her mother, so harmless, so ignorant, so tormented! She
to hurt a child?

After a time, nevertheless, the storm began to subside. But with it died
the hope which is inherent in revolt; in proportion as she grew more
calm the forlornness of her situation rose more clearly before her. At
last that had happened which she had so long expected to happen. The
thing was known. Soon the full consequences would be upon her, the
consequences on which she dared not dwell. Shudderingly she tried to
close her eyes to the things that might lie before her, to the things at
which Grio had hinted, the things of which she had lain thinking--even
while they were distant and uncertain--through many a night of bitter
fear and fevered anticipation.

They were at hand now, and though she averted her thoughts, she knew it.
But the wind is tempered to the shorn. Even as the prospect of future
ill can dominate the present, embitter the sweetest cup, and