his God to witness that he was guiltless of her loss, though he had said
hard words to her by reason of a man called Ambroise. Then, too, the
preacher had exhorted her late and early till her mind was in a maze--it
is enough to have the pangs of youth and love, to be awakened by the pain
of mere growth and knowledge, without the counsel of the overwise to go
jolting through the soul.

The girl was only eighteen. She had never known her mother, she had lived
as the flowers do, and when her hour of trial came she felt herself cast
like a wandering bird out of the nest. In her childhood she had known no
preachers, no teaching, save the wholesome catechism of a father's love
and the sacred intimacy of Nature. Living so, learning by signs the
language of law and wisdom, she had indrawn the significance of legend,
the power of the awful natural. She had made her own commandments.

When Ambroise the courier came, she had looked into his eyes and seen her
own--indeed, it was most wonderful, for those two pairs of eyes were as
those of one person. And each, as each looked, smiled--that smile which
is the coming laughter of a heart at itself. Yet they were different--he
a man, she a woman; he versed in evil, she taught in good; he a vagrant
of the snows, the fruit of whose life was like the contemptible stones of
the desert; she the keeper of a goodly lodge, past which flowed a water
that went softly, making rich the land, the fountain of her perfect
deeds. He, looking into her eyes, saw himself when he had no sin on his
soul; and she into his--as it seemed, her own always--saw herself as it
were in a cobweb of evils which she could not understand. As his heart
grew lighter, hers grew sick, even when she knew that these were the only
eyes in which she could ever see happiness.

It grew upon her that Ambroise's sins were hers and not his; that she,