“I have it, too,” said Cynthia, rather impatiently.

“Cynthia Lennox, I don’t believe you care in the least for this young devotee of yours, for all you are heaping benefits upon her,” Risley said, looking at her quizzically.

“I am not sure that I do,” replied Cynthia, calmly.

“Then why on earth—?”

Suddenly Cynthia began speaking rapidly and passionately, straightening herself in her chair.  “Oh, Lyman, do you think I could do a thing like that, and not repent it and suffer remorse for it all these years?” she cried.

“A thing like that?”

“Like stealing that child,” Cynthia replied, in a whisper.

“Stealing the child?  You did not steal the child.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why, it was only a few hours that you kept her.”

“What difference does it make whether you steal anything for a few hours or a lifetime?  I kept her, and she was crying for her mother, and her mother was suffering tortures all that time.  Then I kept it secret all these years.  You didn’t know what I have suffered, Lyman.”

Cynthia regarded him with a wan look.

Risley half laughed, then checked himself.  “My poor girl, you have the New England conscience in its worst form,” he said.

“You yourself told me it was a serious thing I was doing,” Cynthia said, half resentfully.  “One does not wish one’s sin treated lightly when one has hugged its pricks to one’s bosom for so long—­it detracts from the dignity of suffering.”

“So I did, but all those years ago!”

“If you don’t leave me my remorse, how can I atone for the deed?”

“Cynthia, you are horribly morbid.”

“Maybe you are right, maybe it is worse than morbid.  Sometimes I think I am unnatural, out of drawing, but I did not make myself, and how can I help it?” Cynthia spoke with a pathetic little laugh.

She leaned her head back in her chair, and looked at a star through a gap in the vines.  The shadows of the leaves played over her long, white figure.  Again to Risley, gazing at her, came the conviction as of subtle spiritual deformity in the woman; she was unnatural in something the same fashion that an orchid is unnatural, and it was worse, because presumably the orchid does not know it is an orchid and regret not being another, more evenly developed, flower, and Cynthia had a full realization and a mental mirror clear enough to see the twist in her own character.

Risley had never kissed her in his life, but that night, when they parted, he laid a hand on her soft, gray hair, and smoothed it back with a masculine motion of tenderness, leaving her white forehead, which had a candid, childish fulness about the temples, bare.  Then he put his lips to it.

“You are a silly girl, Cynthia,” he said.

“I wish I were different, Lyman,” she responded, and, he felt, with a double meaning.

“I don’t,” he said, and stroked her hair with a great tenderness, which seemed for the time to quite fill and satisfy his heart.  He was a man of measureless patience, born to a firm conviction of the journey’s end.