Chapter 13 - Page 2

had a powerful feminine effect on him. He used to go and talk to her, and he was not conscious that he went when he was made restless by a lack of something in the mental atmosphere about him. He could talk to her as he could not talk to the rest of Willowfield. She read and thought and argued with herself, and as a product of a provincial dogmatic New England town was a curious development.

"Were you once a brilliant, wicked, feminine mover of things in some old French court?" he said to her once.

They had been plunging deep into the solving of unsolvable problems, and she turned her burning old eyes on him as she answered.

"God knows what I was," she said, "but it was nothing like this--nothing like this--and I was not wicked."

"No," Baird replied, "you were not wicked; but you broke laws."

"Yes, I broke laws," she agreed; "but they were hideous laws--better broken than kept."

She had been puzzled by the fact that after his wife left him he had had a restless period and had seemed to pass through a miserable phase, such as a man suffering from love and longing might endure.

"Has he fallen in love with her because she has gone away?" she wondered; "men are capable of it at times."

But later she decided mentally that this was not his special case. She saw, however, that he was passing through some mental crisis which was a dangerous struggle. He was restless and often away from Willowfield for two or three days at a time.

"To provide the place with orthodox doctrine once a week is more than he can bear, and to be bored to extinction into the bargain makes him feel morbid," she said to herself. "I hope he won't begin to be lured by things which might produce catastrophe."

Once he came and spent a long, hot summer evening with her, and when he went away she had arrived at another decision, and it made her wretched.

"He is lured," she thought. "I cannot help him, and God knows Willowfield could not. After this--perhaps the Deluge."

She saw but little of him for two months, and then he was called across the Atlantic by his wife's illness and left the place.

"Write to me now and then," he said, when he came to bid her good-bye.

"What can I write about from Willowfield to a man in Paris?" she asked.

"About Willowfield," he answered, holding her hand and laughing a little gruesomely. "There will be a thrill in it when one is three thousand miles away. Tell me about the church--about the people--who comes, who goes--your own points of view will make it all worth while. Will you?" almost as if a shade anxiously.

She felt the implied flattery just enough to be vaguely pleased by it.

"Yes, I