“How can I go away?  How can I, how can I?”

She went over to her bed.  The sheet had been turned down, the pillow dented for her face.  Beside the pillow was a tiny reading-stand and on this was a candle and a book—­with thought of her old habit of reading after she had come home from pleasures like those of to-night—­when they were pleasures.  Beside the book her maid had set a little cut-glass vase of blossoms which had opened since she put them there—­were just opening now.

“How can I read?  How can I sleep?”

She crossed to a large window opening on the lawn in the rear of the house—­and looked for the last time out at the gray old pines and dim blue, ever wintry firs.  Beyond were house-tops and tree-tops of the town; and beyond these lay the country—­stretching away to his home.  Soon the morning light would be crimsoning the horizon before his window.

“How can I stay?” she said.  “How can I bear to stay?”

She recalled her last words to him as they parted: 

“Remember that you are forgotten!”

She recalled his reply: 

“Forget that you are remembered!”

She sank down on the floor and crossed her arms on the window sill and buried her face on her arms.  The white dawn approached, touched her, and passed, and she did not heed.

PART SECOND

I

The home of the Merediths lay in a region of fertile lands adapted alike to tillage and to pasturage.  The immediate neighborhood was old, as civilization reckons age in the United States, and was well conserved, It held in high esteem its traditions of itself, approved its own customs, was proud of its prides:  a characteristic community of country gentlemen at the side of each of whom a characteristic lady lived and had her peculiar being.

The ownership of the soil had long since passed into the hands of capable families—­with this exception, that here and there between the borders of large estates little farms were to be found representing all that remained from slow processes of partition and absorption.  These scant freeholds had thus their pathos, marking as they did the losing fight of successive holders against more fortunate, more powerful neighbors.  Nothing in its way records more surely the clash and struggle and ranking of men than the boundaries of land.  There you see extinction and survival, the perpetual going under of the weak, the perpetual overriding of the strong.

Two such fragmentary farms lay on opposite sides of the Meredith estate.  One was the property of Ambrose Webb, a married but childless man who, thus exempt from necessity of raking the earth for swarming progeny, had sown nearly all his land in grass and rented it as pasturage:  no crops of children, no crops of grain.