“Haven’t you ever felt that one—person—was outside everything else? And not to be measured by standards at all?” she asked in a soft, shy voice.
Mrs. Dale’s answer, the answer, too, of a widow, came upon her like a thunderbolt.
“No, dear. I have had no such experience myself. I have never cared for a man in all my life.”
And she spoke with the accents of sincerity.
CHAPTER X.
THE PICKING UP OF SOME SILVER THREADS.
“Mabin!”
“Oh!”
A single syllable hardly conveys the amount of alarm, of horror, of paralyzing fright which Mabin puts into the exclamation.
And yet the occasion was an ordinary one enough. It had simply happened that she had taken her work to the old seat at the edge of the plantation, where the primitive picnics used to take place in the old days, and that Rudolph had come up softly over the fields without her hearing his footsteps on the yielding grass.
“I frightened you?”