Half-dead she had fallen into the old current, not comprehending a tithe of his suffering.

“Oh, I put love into it!” she said dully.  “I thought it the most glorious work I ever did.”

“You tell me wonderfully about yourself, Beth, with these few sentences....  There is nothing finer in my comprehension than the mother-spirit in the maid which makes her love the boy or the man whom she lifts and inspires.”

The cool idealist had returned.  Beth did not welcome him.

“I believe that every achievement which lifts a man above his fellows is energized by some woman’s outpouring heart.  She bestows brave and beautiful things of her own, working in the dark, until the hour of his test, as those fine straws of the Tropics are woven under water——­”

“And what mockery to find,” she finished coldly, “after you have woven and woven, that the fabric finally brought to light is streaky and imperfect.”

Bedient’s business of the moment was to learn if she were right in being as she said, “inexorable”; if she did not sometimes think that a finely-human heart might have come since to that flashing exterior, which had filled the girlish eyes.  He could only draw from the whole savage darkness that the Other still lived in her heart.

“But he will not stay forgotten—­is that it, Beth?”

Into the cold gray light of her mind, came a curious parable that had occurred to her, as they started out to ride this morning, before the great moments of high noon.  And thus she related it to Bedient in the hatred which filled her, last of all from his imperturbable coolness: 

“I saddled a great deal, even as a girl.  In New York, years ago, the desire came to possess a horse of my own.  I bought a beautiful bay colt, pure saddle-bred, rare to look upon; but something always went wrong with him.  He galled, threw a shoe and went lame, stumbled, invariably did the unexpected, and often the dangerous, thing.  Truly he was brand new every morning.  I worried as if he were a child, but I wasn’t the handler for him; he spoiled in my care; yet how I loved that colt—­the first.  He might have killed me, had I kept him....  It was over a year before I had the heart to buy again—­Clarendon—­big, courageous, swifter than the other, splendid in strength, yet absolutely reliable in temper.  Day after day, in all roads and weathers, he never failed nor fell—­until——­”

Beth halted.  The parable faltered here.  She foresaw a dangerous question, and finished it true to Clarendon.

“Until——­” Bedient repeated.

“Until now—­and you have seen him to-day,” she said hastily.  “Always he seems to be aiming at improvement with eager, unabated energy.  In many ways, it was hard for me to realize that a horse could be so noble....  And yet I gave to the first something that I didn’t have for the second.  Something that belonged to the second, was gone from me——­”