The trouble in his eyes met the trouble in hers and called for simple truth. "I was thinking of how you looked at me yesterday when I was in Tom Gavot’s hut and of how you made me suffer last night. And I was praying to God to help me, help me to stop loving you." So naïve and direct were the words that they made Norval breathe hard. In a flash he saw the true nature of the girl before him. She was old, gravely, inheritedly old; and she was, too, a young and pitiful child. People had only touched the outer surface of her character and personality. Alone she had learned the primitive and desperate lessons of womanhood. "Stop loving me?" Norval repeated the words slowly. "Yes, I was beginning to love you very much, more than everything else. Then, when you looked as you did yesterday, I remembered and all night I was afraid. Oh! I am glad you did not get to loving me. It hurts so!" "How do you know that I have not got to loving you? How do you know but that it was because I love you that I looked as I did yesterday?" "Ah, no, Mr. Richard Alton, you couldn’t have looked so had you loved me." Donelle tried to smile and made a pitiful showing. "You don’t know men, Donelle." "But I know love." Now that she had taken her last leave of it, Donelle could talk of it as little Sister Mary might have done, for she had vowed beside the cross to go back to St. Michael’s. Long ago Sister Angela had said that she would find peace there. Then she spoke suddenly to Norval. "You see, maybe you have heard something about Mamsey and me, but you did not quite understand and you felt you had a right to look as you did. I wonder why men want to make it harder for—for women, when women try to forget?" Norval winced; the shaft had sunk into its rightful place. And still the white-faced girl stood her distance, and tried to smile. "I am going to tell you all about Mamsey and me," she said. "I will tell you as we walk along." *CHAPTER XVI* *THE STORY* How little she really knew of life! But how the last year of suffering and renunciation had filled the void with a young but terrible philosophy. Norval did not speak. With bowed head, hands clasped behind him, he walked beside Donelle as she went along, bearing her cross and poor Jo’s. "You see I could not let Mamsey know that I knew. I could not hurt her so. She would have made me go away, and always I would have remembered her here alone where my father left her. And Tom Gavot has helped me keep the people still. He stays here, and he wanted to go way, way off, and be something so different. That is why I can play for Tom in his cabin. He knows and understands; he couldn’t hurt Mamsey and me, he couldn’t! Women like Mamsey and me feel a hurt terribly, that’s why I am telling you this, I want you to be kind. Don’t make things harder, they are bad enough!" "Donelle, for God’s sake, spare me!"