Dawn stood at the little window of her room and watched the two men go down the path from the door. Through the small panes her eyes followed them until they were out of sight, and her heart swelled with thoughts strange and new and fearful. How could she go and live with this man who had frowned at her innocent happiness? Would he not be worse than the woman who had taken her dear mother’s place? And how could he be so cruel as to look at her in that way? It was the look she remembered on her father’s face the day he sent her mother away. It was the cruelty of men. Perhaps they could not help it. Perhaps God made them so. But that other one had been different. He had understood and smiled. Her heart leaped out toward him as she remembered his look. Was it because he was young, she wondered, that he had understood? He had seemed far younger than his companion, yet there had been something fine and manly in his face, in the broadness of his shoulders, and the set of his head, as he walked down the path, away from the house. Perhaps when he was older he would grow that way to, and not understand any more. She sighed and dropped her face against the glass, and, now that they were out of sight, the haughty look melted into tears. CHAPTER V The day that Dawn left school to go back to her home was one long agony to her. All the other girls were happy in the thought of home-going, some of them looking forward to returning for another year, others to entering into a bright girlhood filled with gaieties. But to Dawn it meant going into the gray of a looming fate where never again would she be happy, never again free. Ever since the day of the play when she had seen her future husband frown, she had looked forward to her marriage with terror. He had not come after that, but instead wrote her long letters full of plans about the house, _their house_, that they were to occupy _together_. The letters impressed that thought most deeply and made the whole hateful to her. It grew to seem that it was _his_ house, and she would be his prisoner in it. Yet somehow he had succeeded in impressing her with the feeling that she was pledged to him in sacred honor, and that it would be a dreadful thing to break a tie like that. This was made stronger by her father’s letters, which now grew more frequent, as if he sought to atone to his motherless child for the wrong he had done her.