Oh, Molly, Molly, is it for this you came into the world, twice to give yourself without love?  What difference does it make that your arms are strong and white if they can’t clasp him?  Why are your eyes blue pools of love if they are not for his questioning?

Yes, I know God is very tender with a woman, and I think He understands; so, if she crept very close to Him and caught at His sleeve to steady herself, He would be kind to her until she had the courage to go on along her own steep way.  Please, God, never let him find out, for it would hurt him to have hurt me!

Leaf VIII.

Melted.

Some days are like the miracle flowers that open in the garden from plants you didn’t expect to bloom at all.  I might have been born, lived and died without having this one come into my life, and now that I have had it I don’t know how to write it, except in the crimson of blood, the blue of flame, the gold of glory—­and a tinge of light green would well express the part I have played.  But it is all over at last and—­

Ruth Clinton was the unfolding of the first hour-petal, and I got a glimpse of a heart of gold that I feel dumb with worship to think of.  She’s God’s own good woman, and He made her what she is.  I wish I could have borne her, or she me, and the tenderness of her arms was a sacrament.  We two women just stood aside with life’s artifices and concealments and let our own hearts do the talking.

She said she had come because she felt that if she talked with me I might be better able to understand Alfred when he came, and that she had seen that the judge was very determined, and she thoroughly recognised his force of character.  We stopped there while I gave her the document to read.  I suppose it was dishonourable, but I needed her protection from it.  I’m glad she had the strength of mind to walk with a head high in the air to the fire and burn it up.  Anything might have happened if she hadn’t.  And even now I feel that only my marriage vows will close up the case for the judge—­even yet he may—­ But when Ruth had got done with Alfred, she had wiped Judge Wade’s appreciation of him completely off my mind and destroyed it in tender words that burned us both worse than Jane’s fire burned the letter.  She did me an awfully good service.

“And so you see, you lovely woman, you, do you not, that you were for him, as a tribute to his greatness, and it is given to you to fulfil a destiny?” She was so beautiful as she said it that I had to turn my eyes away, but I felt as I did when those solemn “let-not-man-put-asunder” words were spoken over me by Mr. Raines, our minister.  It made me frightened, and before I knew it I had poured out the whole truth to her in a perfect cataract of words.  The truth always acts on women as some hitherto untried drug, and you can never tell what the reaction is going to be.  In this case I was stricken dumb and found it hard to see.