be coming. But he longed to have it come, to have it tear down the barrier between them.
"So that's what you have known—what every child has, you suppose!" she said passionately, her voice quivering and breaking. She stopped herself abruptly. She could scarcely breathe, her agitation was so great. She knew what she would do if she opened her lips again. But she would die of suffocation if she did not speak. It rose within her like a devouring flood, all that old, ever-new bitterness; and beat her down.
She heard herself, in a desperate, stammering voice, telling him … telling him!
The words that passed her lips did not seem words but bleeding, living, tortured things. She was mortally sick and faint, but she could not stop. Once as in a flicker of lightning she knew what she was doing, and tried to stop—but she had torn it loose from those fibers that had grown so close and hard around it, she had wrenched it away—bloody and raw—it was too late to stop.
When she finished she leaned her face on her hands and was silent, feeling as though she had died. When she finally looked up at him she saw that the tears stood thick in his eyes. She had never dreamed that for good or ill one human being could feel so close to another. It was as though she could not tell whether those tears were his, or had come healingly into her own dry eyes.
She saw the anguish of his yearning sympathy—and yet what was it he said? Something she had not dreamed any one could say, "Oh, the poor little girl you were! Wasn't there any one to help you to get it straight, to understand it?"
"Understand it!" she said harshly. "I understood it only too well."
He looked away from her, across the plain, and kept a thoughtful silence. Then he said, "I don't believe you understood it in the least. Is it likely that any fourteen-year-old little girl could understand anything like that, anything that must have begun, had its real causes back before you were born—and why should you take the point of view of an ig-
