Here my long-cherished resentment toward Roger overflowed. No one could have been with Ellen as I had been without seeing the turmoil in which her spirit lived. She had grown thin and of a certain transparency as do those whose sufferings of the spirit affect their bodies profoundly. I knew there were long times when he didn’t write; I knew how she waited for his letters; I knew how seldom he came. I felt, in my wisdom, that she bore from Roger things I would stand from no man. I had learned, step by step with Ellen, that Ellen’s life and all her happiness were in careless hands and, in Alec’s language, that there was no country of the heart there for her. I looked at Roger with level-eyed disgust.

“Why, Roger,” I asked him, “don’t you break your engagement now, if that’s what you mean to do?”

To my point-blank question, he only stared at me. “I don’t want to break it,” he said. “Ellen’s just exactly the kind of a woman I want for my wife,” he added.

“But in your good time,” said I bitterly.

He looked at me with his bold, laughing eyes:

“There’s a delight of life with Ellen that I can find with no one else. I know what she is, Roberta, a thousand times more than you. She’s the only alive person in the world, but since you put the words in my mouth, ‘In my own good time!’” He had completely recovered his good-tempered arrogance.

“I’d never stand from you what Ellen’s stood, and I hope she says good-bye to you now,” I cried.

It is easy for those not in love to place the limit to love’s endurance. It is fortunately not easy to keep these shallow promises to one’s self.

I am sorry that so much of what was most unlovely in Roger creeps into my story. At the time I had no patience with him, his undeniable charm and interest offended me as it kept Ellen bound to him. I wanted, as youth always does, people to be all bad or all good, and Roger would be neither of these things. I realize now that, faithful or unfaithful, he kept Ellen’s life full of him, nor could she escape his compelling personality. There are many men we should not quarrel with,—men who can so absorb us, like him of the ultra-masculine type, who have everything but pity and understanding of what they themselves haven’t felt. They are of all men the most attractive to women and they care the least about the individual. From now on she loved him always with a fear that he was waiting for her with a knife for her back. She wrote:—

A little later she became more accustomed to the idea and wrote:—

There was very little use in her trying to hearten herself with brave words, for women know when a part of the life of the man they love belongs to them and when it doesn’t. Many of us live for years separated from the man we love, and know that his thoughts turn to us continually, that time and space are a terrible, practical joke played by destiny on mankind. There had been a moment in Ellen’s life when, whether he were thinking of her or not, there was no place in his life where she might not go, and now the foundation of a real affection was lacking between them, and that foundation is sincerity. In whatever way she tried to go to him she came upon high walls and barriers of silence, places in his spirit marked “No thoroughfare.”

This was how Ellen’s spirit lived, racked and torn between its grave fears and its momentary and joyful hopes, while the day was passed in a thousand details of a house humming with children. As Ellen said herself, “The outer side of her life was living in sunshine and the inner side in darkness and doubt.” In town people said Ellen was working too hard over Mr. Sylvester’s brood, for she seemed at that time so frail that through the transparent shell of her one could see her spirit burning.

None of the family suspected that there was any misunderstanding between them, for Roger had a very kindly generosity. He was a man prodigal in the small acts of kindness, and was forever sending things for the children and for Mrs. Sylvester, whom he treated like an elder sister, teasing her and loving her. Miss Grant was the only one who had had occasional misgivings, and I learned from my grandmother that Roger’s family were not satisfied with his “goings on,” and that while he was being a success, his mother was worried over him, which made my grandmother remark:—

“I wish that young man had fallen from his horse and broken his neck before ever he set eyes on Ellen Payne. Old women like us forget that young creatures die of a broken heart now and again, and if they could only die! The best friend I ever had, Roberta, had all the youth and love killed in her and went on living like a dry, little automaton of a woman, and is living yet. Instead of the things she might have had,—children and a husband and a home,—she has just her own dried-up body, which is like a little birch tree struck by lightning; and the thing she thinks of most in life is the noise that the sparrows make in her elm trees.” But I could not fear that a fate like that awaited my Ellen, for my memory of her then is a lovely frail thing, with a hand forever held out to Prudentia and Flavilla.

Prudentia when crossed stopped, as was her custom, to pray. She prayed in season and out of season and for everything, and it was against her father’s principles to stop her.

“How stop a child communing with her Maker?” he would argue, to which Ellen would reply with spirit:—

“She’s only communing with her own selfishness when she says: ‘Oh! God, send the boys home so Ellen can tell me a story.’”

For several of Alec’s youngsters hung around the old Scudder place a great deal, and accompanied Ellen on her walks, as though Alec had left her, in those boys, a bit of his protecting spirit.