She wondered why there should slide into her mood, just now, a faint tinge of regret. . . .  Why should there be anything there but the bright gladness of thanksgiving for the liberation from the chains which her own nature might have forged about her?  She had at last stepped outside the narrow circle of personal desire, and found all the world open to her.  And yet there was room in her heart for a shade of wistful wonder if perhaps all this did not mean that she might be sliding from the ranks of those who feel and do, into the ranks of those who only understand.

But one glance at the life that lay before her scattered this hanging mist-cloud . . . good heavens! what feeling and doing lay there before her!

Had she thought that Neale was nothing to her because he had become all in all to her so that he penetrated all her life, so that she did not live an instant alone?  Had she thought the loss of the amusing trinket of physical newness could stand against the gain of an affection ill massy gold?  Would she, to buy moments of excitement, lose an instant of the precious certainty of sympathy and trust and understanding which she and Neale had bought and paid for, hour by hour, year by year of honest life-in-common?  Where was real life for her?  Had she not known?  Where were the real depths, where the real food for the whole woman she had grown to be?  Neale had opened the door so that she could go away from him if that was what she needed, or go back to stand by his side; and through the open door had come the flood of daylight which had shown her that she could not go back to stand by his side because she had been there all the time, had never left it, never could leave it, any more than she could leave half of her body in one place, and go on to another.

II

There was other feeling and doing now, too, before her, this instant, which she had forgotten, idling here in her much-loved forest, as much a part of her home as her piano or her own roof-tree.  She had been trying to understand what had been happening that summer.  Let her try first of all to understand what she must do in that perfectly definite and concrete dilemma in which she had been placed by that strange sight of ’Gene Powers, fleeing back from the Eagle Rocks.  She must look squarely at what she supposed was the legal obligation . . . she instantly felt a woman’s impatience of the word legal as against human, and could not entertain the thought of the obligations of the situation.  She must see, and think and try to understand, with Neale to help her.  She had not yet had time to tell Neale.