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162 slowly, "livin' there all alone sence—for so long."

A light broke in upon Marden somehow, like the sun burning through a fog. In a flash his mind sped over the consequences. By his simple logic, if he should love this woman, he would marry her, and she would come to live— His whole nature suffered a revulsion, an upheaval. He put the hand slowly and coldly away from him. And she, who was looking only for such treatment as she had learned to expect from other men, found his gray eyes suddenly quiet, distant, full of undecipherable thoughts; and she half wondered at and half despised him.

"I am," he replied at last. Then, picking up his things from among the gravel, "Good-by," he said, and clambered up the path without looking back.

All that afternoon he walked furiously up river through a quiet hill and valley region that, with the gulls flecking it, might have been the Scottish highlands. All that evening he paced before the silent house, in the darkness. Sometimes he could have laughed