however--that conscience which never possessed him fully until the day he
saw Rosalie go travelling over the hills with her crippled father. That
picture of the girl against the twilight, her figure silhouetted in the
clear air, had come to him in sleeping and waking dreams, the type and
sign of an everlasting melancholy. As he looked at her blindly now, he
saw, not herself, but that melancholy figure. Out of the distance his
own voice said again:

"Now--I know-the truth!"

She had struck with a violence she did not intend, which, she knew, must
rend her own heart in the future, which put in the dice-box the last
hopes she had. But she could not have helped it--she could not have
stayed the words, though a suspended sword were to fall with the saying.
It was the cry of tradition and religion, and every home-bred, convent-
nurtured habit, the instinct of heredity, the wail of woman, for whom
destiny, or man, or nature, has arranged the disproportionate share of
life's penalties. It was the impotent rebellion against the first curse,
that man in his punishment should earn his bread by the sweat of his
brow--which he might do with joy--while the woman must work out her
ordained sentence "in sorrow all the days of her life."

In her bitter words was the inherent revolt of the race of woman. But
now she suddenly felt that she had flung him an infinite distance from
her; that she had struck at the thing she most cherished--his belief that
she loved him; that even if she had told the truth--and she felt she had
not--it was not the truth she wished him most to feel.

For an instant she stood looking at him, shocked and confounded, then her
changeless love rushed back on her, the maternal and protective spirit