She had been fashioned to be his helpmate, as surely as if she had been made of the same bone. Nature was at one with God. Spirit and body both yearned for him. It was not position—power for herself that she craved. The marriage market—if that had been her desire: it had always been open to her. She had the gold that buys these things. Wealth, ambition: they had been offered to her—spread out temptingly before her eyes. They were always within her means, if ever she chose to purchase them. It was this man alone to whom she had ever felt drawn—this man of the people, with that suggestion about him of something primitive, untamed, causing her always in his presence that faint, compelling thrill of fear, who stirred her blood as none of the polished men of her own class had ever done. His kind, strong, ugly face: it moved beside her: its fearless, tender eyes now pleading, now commanding. “Don’t think me unsympathetic,” she said. “No one will rejoice more than I shall if God sees fit to call you to good work. But I can’t help letting fall my little tear of fellowship with the weeping.”!

“The old story?” suggested Miss Ensor. “Yes,” answered Joan. “I’m a journalist.”

She ran to him and, seizing his listless arms, put them round her. “Oh, just enough to be of no use,” Mary answered. “Carleton was rather decent, so far as that part of it was concerned, and insisted on paying him a fair price. The market value would have been much less; and he wanted to be out of it.” He bent forward so that he could see into her eyes.