Miss Muller, seeing him on the bridge from the windows of her room,
supposed her message had been given: "He has stayed to know how he
may win me." For the first time she faced the riddle squarely. In the
morning she had only wished weakly to keep him beside her.

He was married. Popular novels offered recipes by the score for the
cure of such difficulties in love. But Maria was no reader of novels.
Out of a strict Calvinistic family she and her brother had leaped
into heterodoxy--William to pause neatly poised on the line where
Conventionalism ended; Maria to flounder in an unsounded quagmire,
which she believed the well of Truth. Five years ago she would have
felt her chance of salvation in danger if she had spoken to a woman
who persisted in loving a married man. But five years work strange
changes in the creeds of young women now-a-days; and Maria's heart was
choosing her creed for her to-day, according to the custom of her sex.

She saw Doctor McCall idly leaning over the foot-bridge of the creek
while he smoked. Passion and brilliancy unknown to them before came
into her dark eyes: she stretched out her hands as though she would
have dragged him to her: "Must I give him up because of this wife whom
he long ago cast off?"

If she tempted him to marry her? She knew what name her old church,
her old friends, even her father, who was still living, would apply to
her. Some of these people with whom she had lately cast in her lot had
different views on the subject of marriage. Hitherto, Maria had kept
clear of them. "The white wings of her Thought," she had said, "should
not be soiled by venturing near impurity." Now she remembered their
arguments against marriage as profound and convincing.