Eve looked at him once. Then she turned away. What a change in herself! Now she understood Cicely. Now she understood--yes, she understood everything--the things she had always despised--pettiness, jealousy, impossible hopes, disgrace, shame. "I was afraid Cicely would be alarmed," Paul went on. And Eve was not offended that it was Cicely of whom he was thinking. It had not yet occurred to her that he could think of her. She went in search of Cicely, who had nothing to say to her; then, excusing herself, she retreated to her room. Here she took off her dress and began to unbraid her hair. Then the thought came to her that Paul would go to the parlor about this time, that he would play a game of chess, perhaps, with the judge; hastily repairing the disorder she had made, she rearranged the braids, felt in the rough closet for her evening shoes, put them on, and went down-stairs again with rapid step. Cicely made no remark as she came in; Paul and the judge were playing their game, with Hollis looking on. Eve took a book and sat reading, or apparently reading, at some distance. "Oh, how abject this is! How childish, how sickening!" Anger against herself rose hotly; under its sting she felt her strength returning. She sat there as long as the others did. "I will not make a second scene by going out" (but no one had noticed her first). She answered Paul's good-night coldly. But when she was back in her room again, when there was no more escape from its four walls until morning, then she found herself without defences, without pretexts, face to face with the fact that she loved this man, this Paul Tennant, with all her heart. It was a surprise as great as if she had suddenly become blind, or deaf, or mad--"stricken of God," as people call it. "I am stricken. But I am not sure it is of God!" That she, no longer a girl, after all these years untouched by such feelings--that she, with her clear vision and strong will (she had always been so proud of her will), should be led captive in this way by a stranger who cared nothing for her, who did not even wish to capture--it was a sort of insanity. She paced her room to and fro as she had paced the fringe of woods. She stretched out her hands and looked at them as though they had been the hands of some one else; she struck one of them upon her bare arm; she was so humiliated that she must hurt something; that something should be herself. "If he should ever care for me, I would refuse him," she repeated, in bitter triumph. Immediately the thought followed, "He will never care!" "I do not love him really," she kept repeating. "I am not well; it will pass." But while she was saying this, there came a glow that contradicted her, a glow before whose new sway she was helpless. "Oh, I do! I loved him the first day I saw him. What is that old phrase?--I love the ground he walks on." She buried her face in her hands.