n the room, just beyond the fire's glow. Her
fear was taking shape.

"Oh! dearie, I might then ask Larry to release me from my promise. My
doctor used to say one could do that, but if he would not, why,
then--I'd keep my bargain as far as I could. But----" and here
Mary-Clare rose and flung her arms above her head. The action was
jubilant, majestic. "Oh! the wonder of it all; to be free to be myself
and prove what I _think_ is right without having to take another's
idea of it. I'll listen; I'll try to understand and be patient--but it
cannot be wrong, Aunt Polly, the thing I've done--since this great
feeling of wings has come to me instead of heavy feet! Why, dear, I
want something more than--than the things women _think_ are theirs. We
don't know what is ours until we try."

"And fail, my child?" Aunt Polly was crying.

"Yes; and fail sometimes and be hurt--but paying and going on."

"And leaving your man behind you?"

"Aunt Polly"--Mary-Clare looked down upon the kind, quivering face--"a
woman's man cannot be left behind. He'll be beside her somehow. If she
stays back, as I've tried to do, she wouldn't be his woman! That's the
dreadful trouble with Larry and me. But, dearie, it isn't always a man
in a woman's life."

"But the long, lonely way, child!" Polly was retracing her own denied
womanhood.

"It need not be lonely, dear, when we women find--other things. They
will count. They must."

"What other things, Mary-Clare?"

"That's what we must be finding out, dear. Love; the man: some day
they will be the glory, making everything more splendid, but not--the
all. I think I should have died, Aunt Polly, had I kept on."

Like an inspired young oracle, Mary-Clare spoke and then dropped again
by the fire.

"I've somehow learned all this," she whispered, "in my Place up on the
hill. It just came to me, little by little, until it convinced me. I
had to tell Larry the truth."

"Mary-Clare, I do not know; I don't feel able to put it into words,
but I do believe you're going to make sad trouble for yourself, child.
Such a thing as this you have done has never been done before in the
Forest."

"Maybe."

A door upstairs slammed loudly and both women started nervously.

"I must tell Peter to fix the latch of the attic door to-morrow," Aunt
Polly said, relieved to be back on good, plain, solid ground. "The
attic winders are raised and the wind's rising. It will be slam, slam
all night, unless----" she rose quic