“But her thoughts may take another direction.  Who can tell what impression that malicious vixen has made upon her?”

“Alice, I fancy, is a sensible young woman; and Miss Sandford, in her rage, must have shown her hand too freely.  To be sure, Alice might wonder how you could ever have been captivated; but she could not blame you for getting out of reach of such a Tartar.  Besides, the exemplary widow is your friend, you know, and I’ll warrant that she will set the matter right.  Marcia won’t trouble you again; such a mischance couldn’t happen twice.  You are as safe as the sailor who put his head into the hole where a cannon-shot had just come through.  Lightning doesn’t strike the same tree twice in one shower.”

Greenleaf was at length persuaded to wait and let events take their course.  If he remained inactive, however, Easelmann did not; from Mrs. Sandford he heard daily the progress of affairs, and at length intimated to his friend that it might be judicious to call again.

Once more Greenleaf was seated in the drawing-room of the boarding-house.  At every distant footstep his heart beat almost audibly; and when at last the breezy rustle of a woman’s robes came in from the hall, he thought, as many a man has, before and since,—­

“She is coming, my life, my fate!”

She entered, not with the welcoming smile he would have liked to see, nor with the forbidding cloud of sadness which veiled her face a few days before.  But how lovely!  Time had given fulness and perfection to her beauty, while the effect of the trials she had undergone was seen only in the look of womanly dignity and self-control she had acquired.  It was the freshness of girlhood joined to the grace of maturity.

Nothing is more inscrutable than the working of the human will; argument does not reach it, nor does persuasion overcome it.  It holds out against reason, against interest, against passion; no sufficient motive can be found with which to control it.  On the other hand, it sometimes stoops in a way that defies prediction; pride is vanquished or disarmed, resentment melts away like frost, and the resolution that at first seemed firm as the everlasting rock proves to be no barrier.  Nor is this uncertainty confined to the sex at whose foibles the satirists have been wont to let fly their arrows.

Feeling is deeper than thought; and as the earthquake lifts the mountain with all the weight of its rocky strata and of the piled-up edifices that crown its top, so there comes a time when the emotional nature rises up and overthrows the carefully wrought structures of the intellect, and asserts its original and supreme mastery over the soul of man.

Alice felt sure that every trace of her love for Greenleaf had disappeared.  She looked in her heart and saw there only the memory of neglect and unfaithfulness.  If love existed, it was as fire lurks in ashes, unrecognized.  She had conversed freely with Mrs. Sandford, and learned that Greenleaf’s version of the story was the correct one.  Still the original treason remained without apology; and she had determined to express her regret for what had happened, to assure him of her friendship, but to forbid any hope of reestablishing their former relations.  With this intention, she bade him good-morning and quietly took a seat.