ONE:
ONE:Reuben started.After the children were in bed she changed her dress, putting on the best she hada washing silk with pansies sewn over it, one of her wedding gowns. She frowned at it as she had frowned at the babies' dressesit was so old-fashioned, and worn in places. She suddenly found herself wishing that she loved Reuben so much as not to mind wearing old clothes for his sake. For the first time she could visualise such a state of affairs, for she had met the man for whom she would have worn rags. If only that man had been Reuben, her lawful husband, instead of another! "But I'll be true to him! I'll be true to him!" she murmured, and found comfort in the words till she realised that it was the first time that she had ever glimpsed the possibility of not being true.
ONE:He could not tell exactly what it was that had invigorated him, and jerked him out of his despair. It would seem as if Alice's presence alone had tonic qualities. Perhaps the secret lay in her unchangeableness. He had gone back to her after an absence of five years, and found her just the same, still loving him, still fighting him, the old Alice. Everything else had changedhis farm which in the former days had been the thriving envy of the countryside was now little better than a ruin, his home life had been turned inside out, but in the woman over at Cheat Land nothing had altered, love and strength and faithfulness still flourished in her. It was as if a man stumbling in darkness should suddenly hear a loved, familiar voice say "Here I am." The situation summed itself up in three wordsShe was there; and his heart added"for me to take if I choose.""Stop one moment," returned Holgrave, and stepping into the cottage, he took a warm frieze cloak from a peg in the wall, and throwing it over his shoulders, was reaching for a kind of short-handled spear that lay on a shelf above the fire-place, when Margaret, clasping his left hand, looked up in his face, and asked with a pale and trembling lip, "Stephen, where are you going? Who is that man?"
