that you forgive me!"

She managed to give him the assurance he sought, her desperate,
passionate voice grown gentle and quiet again. But she was too tired and
spent to be comforted. For a long time she lay so still that he became
alarmed, thinking she must have fainted again, and drew closer to her to
listen to her breathing; at first there was a little catch in it,
betraying sobs not yet wholly controlled, then gradually it grew calm and
even; she had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion.

Austin, sitting motionless beside her, found the night one of
purification and dedication. To men of Thomas's type, slow of wit, steady
and stolid and unemotional, the soil gives much of her own peaceful
wholesomeness. But those like Austin, with finer intellects, higher
ambitions, and stronger passions, often fare ill at her hands. Their
struggles towards education and the refinements of life are balked by
poverty and the utter fatigue which comes from overwork; while their
search for pleasure often ends in a knowledge and experience of vices so
crude and tawdry that men of greater wealth and more happy experience
would turn from them in disgust, not because they were more moral, but
because they could afford to be more fastidious. Between Broadway and the
"main street" of Wallacetown, and other places of its type--small
railroad or manufacturing centres, standing alone in an otherwise purely
agricultural community--the odds in favor of virtue, not to say decency,
are all in favor of Broadway; and Wallacetown, to the average youth of
Hamstead, represents the one opportunity for a "show," "something to
drink," and "life" in general. Sylvia had unlocked the door of material
opportunity for Austin; but she had done far more than this. She had
given him the vision of the higher things that lay beyond that, and the
desire to attain them. Further than that, neither she nor any other woman