They had left the last house behind; they were out in the open country. Elizabeth dropped the reins and let her tears flow unchecked—hot, blinding tears, the bitterest she had ever shed. At each familiar tree and landmark she sobbed with redoubled violence. Only an hour before she had driven along this same road in the ecstatic glow of her first romance. Now all the bloom had been rubbed from that romance, all the glory faded from the hero of her dreams; she herself was a woman who had been insulted, humiliated, dragged in the dust.

By degrees a few coherent phrases detached themselves from the confused mass of painful recollections, and stung more sharply than the rest. "My mother better than yours—she wasn't even respectable; no decent people would speak to her" ... Oh, it was too bad—too bad; she had not thought it was so bad as that. Amanda must have exaggerated—she would ask her aunts; but no, no she would never speak of that interview to a soul. It was humiliating enough as it was.... "He kissed me once. Has he kissed you yet?" No, thank Heaven! that indignity had been spared her. They had hovered as yet on the borderland of love; she had put off the inevitable declaration with instinctive coquetry, a vague unwillingness to be won too easily. She was glad now—glad and thankful; he did not know that she cared,—he should never know. She had no love for the man who had kissed Amanda.... "Selfish and spoiled—thinking only of herself?" Yes, she might be all that; but at least she would not take another woman's lover. The words "it would be base," rang in her ears. Had she spoken them, or Amanda? At all events, they were true. It would be base to marry Halleck now. In fact, she did not wish to marry him. It was he who had involved her in this horrible, sordid misery. Her aunts were right; there must be distinctions of classes. Had her father remembered this, people would not have it in their power to insult his daughter now.

Through all her complex feelings ran a sharp sense of anger against Amanda, mingled strangely with an involuntary pity, almost with an understanding of her point of view. It was not based on justice, but on fellow feeling. Amanda had resented her superiority; she, Elizabeth, knew what that was. She had felt the same herself, when smarting impotently under the patronizing friendliness of the other girls in the Neighborhood, and then had turned, with unconscious snobbery, to play the same part towards Amanda. The incongruous, grotesque humor of the situation struck her suddenly, and she laughed out loud in bitter irony. She had envied the other girls of the Neighborhood, Amanda had envied her, the girls at Bassett Mills had envied Amanda. Strange net-work of classes in a democratic country, of distinctions the more galling for their intangibility. Of one thing Elizabeth was convinced, that she could never herself "put on airs" as Amanda had said, again; there was not a girl in the whole countryside, blessed with a good mother, who could not look down on her, if she pleased.

Her tears were falling now so fast and blinding that she could not see the road; she was not even conscious that they had reached the spot where the white pony stopped now of his own accord. And even as he did so, a young man stepped forward and grasped the reins which had fallen from Elizabeth's nerveless hand; a tall, fair young man who had been standing for the last half hour, scanning anxiously, with his bright blue eyes, the glaring dusty road.

"Elizabeth," said Halleck (he had called her that for five happy days) "Elizabeth, why are you so late? And, for Heaven's sake, what's the matter?"

Elizabeth looked up and with great effort, stopped crying; but otherwise she made no sign of pleasure in his presence or even of recognition. She put up one hand, indeed, and straightened her hat, but this was a purely mechanical concession to the force of habit. She knew that her face was flushed and tear-stained, her eyes red and swollen; she was sure that she looked an absolute fright, and she did not care. She was past caring, at least for the moment.

"Elizabeth," Halleck repeated, more and more bewildered, "what is the matter? I've been waiting for you an hour. You've been crying," he added, stating unnecessarily an obvious fact. "Won't you tell me what it is?"

"Nothing—nothing," Elizabeth answered at last, in a voice that was still thick and choked with sobs. "I haven't been crying or," struck by the futility of denial, she added hastily "if I have it—it's no matter. Will you please let me pass?" She tried to take the reins from his hands, but he grasped them firmly, and laid the other hand on the bar of the wagon.

"Won't you let me pass?" she repeated stubbornly.

"Not till you tell me what's the matter."

He eyed her coolly, determinedly, all the habit of power depicted on the lines of his handsome face. She stared back at him defiantly, with her tear-swollen eyes. Her whole attitude breathed the spirit of rebellion; a spirit new in their intercourse. Halleck saw it, at the same time that he noted the disfiguring marks of tears on her face. Oddly enough, he had never admired her so much.

Nevertheless, he was determined to remain master of the situation. He glanced up and down the road; there were never many people passing, but it was not safe to rely on this fact.

"We can't talk here," he said. "Come into the field."

"I don't wish to," she said, stubbornly. "I'm going home."

He fixed his eyes upon her. "You shall not go home," he said quietly, "till you have told me all about it." She sat immovable, her pouting under lip thrust out in a way that she had sometimes, in moments of obstinacy and displeasure. She did not meet his eyes. "Don't be childish," Paul said, pleasantly, after a moment. "You know you must tell me what it is."

She looked up reluctantly, and met his steady gaze, under which she turned first white, then red, and slowly, as if fascinated, rose from her seat. Yet still her words were unyielding. "We may as well have it out at once," she said, coldly.

Halleck could not repress a thrill of triumph. It was sweet to test his power over this beautiful, high-spirited girl, to feel her will, her intellect, like wax in his hands. But he tried not to show this consciousness in his face. She was in a strange mood; he did not understand her. Gravely and respectfully he helped her to scale the stone wall, which separated the meadow from the road. Her hand barely rested on his, and her eyes were averted carefully, but he paid no heed. He fastened the white pony to a tree, then slowly and thoughtfully followed Elizabeth across the field.

The noon-day sun beat down upon them in all its scorching brilliancy; it was pleasant to gain the shade of their usual trysting-place. Here the little brook, which had rippled and sparkled over stones and moss all the way from the mill-stream, formed itself into a quiet pool, over which weeping willows spread out long branches, and seemed to admire their own reflection in the cool green mirror beneath. Elizabeth took her usual seat on a fallen moss-covered log, drawing, as she did so, her white skirts about her, with what seemed an involuntary gesture of repulsion, and Halleck, who was about to place himself beside her, flushed and bit his lip. After a moment's hesitation, he threw himself down sullenly on the grass a little way off.

"Tell me," he said, in a tone that was the more determined for this little episode "tell me now what the matter is."

Elizabeth's eyes were fixed upon the cool, green water at her feet. "I don't know why you think," she said, slowly "that it has anything to do with you."

"Not when you are a full hour late for our appointment? Not when you treat me like an outcast? Oh, Elizabeth,"—the young man's voice softened suddenly, skillfully—"how can you trifle with me so, when I love you?"

He caught, or thought he did, a quiver in her face, although her eyes were still resolutely bent upon the pool. "Yes, I love you," he repeated. "I've loved you, I believe, ever since the day you came into that horrid, stuffy little room, looking like an angel—with that hair and that skin—so different from Amanda."—

He stopped as an indignant wave of color flamed in Elizabeth's cheeks. "How can you speak of Amanda—like that?" she broke out passionately, "when you loved her too, or told her so at least, when you said the same things no doubt to her that you are saying now to me?"

A light broke in upon Paul. In his relief he laughed out loud. "Amanda," he said. "Amanda! So she has been talking to you? And you believed all the nonsense she told you? And that is why you acted so strangely. I thought it was something serious!" And he laughed again in sheer light-heartedness. So all this had been only jealous pique, after all.

The gloom on Elizabeth's face did not lighten. "You seem to find the idea amusing," she said, coldly. "I do not."

"Because you don't understand how absurd it is. I never made love to Amanda—if she made love to me"—Paul stopped, warned by a curious stiffening in Elizabeth's attitude that he was on dangerous ground. She was not like other girls whom he had known—he had noticed this before; she required special treatment. "My dear child," he said, in a calm, argumentative tone "really you are a little hard on me. A man can't measure every word he says to a girl. I may have paid Amanda a few compliments, flirted with her a little, if you insist upon it, but—that's not a crime, is it? And I never gave her a thought, I hardly remembered her existence, after I had once—seen you." There was unmistakable sincerity in his voice. "Look at me, Elizabeth," he went on anxiously, "look at me, and tell me that you believe me."

Elizabeth raised her troubled eyes to his. "I—I don't know," she said, slowly. She did believe him—to some extent, at least. But what he told her did not alter the fact that it was she who had taken him away from Amanda, that, but for her, he might have been her cousin's admirer still. And that, after all, had been the substance of Amanda's accusation.

"Tell me the truth," she said, suddenly "if I had not come in that day—if you had never seen me, would you—would you have married Amanda?" She fixed her eager eyes upon his face, and waited breathless for his answer. He gave it with a light laugh.

"Marry Amanda!" he declared, "well, hardly! Such an idea never entered my head."

"Then," said Elizabeth, slowly "you deceived her."

He shrugged his shoulders. "She deceived herself, I think," he said. "It's not my fault if she—imagined things. Why should I marry a girl like that? She's not pretty, she's stupid, ignorant. Bah, don't talk to me of Amanda." He disposed of the matter with a wave of the hand and another light laugh. Elizabeth felt a sudden conviction of the absurdity of her own behavior. The painful, scorching flush in her cheeks was beginning to cool; the burning, angry shame in her heart was dying away. The remembrance of Amanda's words grew fainter; Paul's handsome face, his air of triumphant health and life, were again in the ascendent.

He saw the yielding in her eyes and brought out his most effective argument. He took boldly the seat beside her on the log and though she shrank away, it was not, he thought, entirely with aversion. "My darling," he said, "don't let trifles come between us. I love you, you love me; isn't that enough? Elizabeth, you are the most beautiful woman in the world. Elizabeth, dearest" ... He put out his arm and drew her towards him. She still shrank away, fascinated yet trembling, frightened at this new delight, this thrill of pleasure in his touch.

"Don't," she gasped out, "Amanda"—He stopped her protest with a kiss.

And it was not till later, when she reached home, that she thought again of Amanda's words: "Remember, he kissed me first."