never believed in its existence. But between him and this wild adventure there stood a barrier against which he could make no progress. It was an invisible wall of a sort he had never encountered in any woman, not even in the terrible serenity of Sabine. Hard it was, and clear like crystal, protecting something which he might see but never touch. She's not the ordinary sort. . . . You'd best keep clear of her.
On the opposite side of the door Ellen flung herself down on the ugly divan and wept, silently and horribly, as she had wept once before in the dark solitude of her own virginal room, while the autumn rain drenched the garden outside. And again she could not have told why she wept. It was a passionate sensuous weeping which exhausted itself presently and left her weary and quiet until long after the lights had begun to twinkle through the smoke along the river.
Yet nothing had happened—nothing at all of which she could say, "It is this or that."
MEANWHILE from the Town there came to Ellen in the weekly letters of her mother bits of news which sometimes interested her but more often did not. There was the news of May Seton's marriage to Herman Biggs, an evening wedding in the Methodist church with a supper afterwards at which Skinflint Seton, in a gesture of triumph and vindication, had flung loose the purse strings and gone so far as to provide an orchestra which played behind a screen of smilax and carnations.
"Herman," wrote Hattie Tolliver, "looked a gawk, with his freckles, and May was too fat for her dress. It was cut princess fashion and trimmed with duchess lace. She carried a shower bouquet of white roses and sweet peas. Herman's trousers
