The New World 255

Love and sees him looking for her, and knows
she must shrink from the arms she would lie in,
and only call to him in a voice he cannot hear.
This is not a love that is always bitter. It grows
sweet with age. But could that dry the tears of
the little Egyptian, who had only been a woman
for a day?

Much was still dark to her. Of one obstacle
that must keep her and Gavin ever apart she
knew, and he did not; but had it been removed
she would have given herself to him humbly, not
in her own longing, but because he wanted her.
“ Behold what I am,” she could have said to him
then, and left the rest to him, believing that her
unworthiness would not drag him down, it would
lose itself so readily in his strength. That
Thrums could rise against such a man if he
defied it, she did not believe; but she was to
learn the truth presently from a child.

To most of us, I suppose, has come some
shock that was to make us different men from
that hour, and yet, how many days elapsed before
something of the man we had been leapt up in
us? Babbie thought she had buried her old
impulsiveness, and then remembering that from
the top of the field she might see Gavin returning
from church, she hastened to the hill to look
upon him from a distance. Before she reached
the gate where I had met her and him, however,
she stopped, distressed at her selfishness, and
asked, bitterly, “Why am I so different from
other women; why should what is so easy to
them be so hard to me?”

“Gavin, my beloved!” the Egyptian cried, in