Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/364

354 "I don't imagine she suffered," he said, hesitating; "no, not a little bit. She was full of a great ambition to benefit her sex. She told me that if she married she must still continue to serve this ideal, and I was young and hot-headed then, and we quarrelled over it and parted."

"It was a little thing for which to throw over a woman you loved," Barbara said, her face crimson and her eyes studying the distance.

"A little thing!" he said hotly;" it was no little thing, that cursed 'movement,' that took a soft, gentle, loving woman and changed her into a hard, unforgiving, cruel one."

Barbara regarded him in angry surprise.

"They both parted to go their own ways," she said, "the man as well as the woman."

"But the man wrote a humble letter to the woman begging her forgiveness, asking her to come back to him, that he was miserable and wretched, that he was going abroad unless she told him to stay."

He rose to his feet and put his hand into the hollow of the tree.

"He posted it here, and when he came