Page:MacLeod Raine - The Sheriff's Son.djvu/332

 hard. But it is just a surface hardness nature has provided as a protection to you."

"Since it is there, I don't see that it helps much to decide why it is a part of me," she returned with a wan little smile.

"But it does," he insisted. "It matters a lot. The point is that it is n't you at all. Some day you 'll slough it the way a butterfly does its shell."

"When?" she wanted to know incredulously.

He did not look at her while he blurted out his answer. "When you are happily married to a man you love who loves you."

"Oh! I'm afraid that will be never." She tried to say it lightly, but her face glowed from the heat of an inward fire.

"There's a deep truth in the story of the princess who slept the years away until the prince came along and touched her lips with his. Don't you think lots of people are hampered by their environment? All they need is escape." He suggested this with a shy diffidence.

"Oh, we all make that excuse for ourselves," she answered with a touch of impatient scorn. "I'm all the time doing it. I say if things were different I would be a nice, sweet-tempered, gentle girl and not fly out like that Katherine in