"Oh, you needn't pity me at all!" Marie-Aimée laughed harshly through her tears. "When I think that I might--that there could have been the possibility--that those three years should so have changed me, that I should have grown so cold and dry-hearted, and proud of my dry-hearted coldness, and supposed it a virtue, and called it morality, that when he turned to his old comrade for a little cheer against the thickening shadows, the fast-coming gray hairs, the lost voice, the domestic _misères_, I might have refused, I am glad and grateful for the ill-name and the snubs that may follow me the rest of my life because I didn't." Whereupon her voice came utterly to wreck; she subsided into soft unrestrained weeping. Mrs. Bronson with a distressed frown left her seat for the corner of a divan which was nearer Marie-Aimée. After listening helplessly a moment, fidgeting, embarrassed by her life-habit of undemonstrativeness, she put out her hands, quick as darting swallows, and enclosed one of Marie-Aimée's, pressing it, stroking it, murmuring, "Don't! Don't! You are a dear!" Without a word Marie-Aimée turned her wet face to kiss the cheek of the consoler. Mrs. Bronson pressed closer to her; and the two sat crushed against each other with interlocked, hands--and so, silently drifted into a different relation. It was as if the thoughts of their blood had communed through their hands, and there were no need more to conceal anything. "Imagine," Marie-Aimée said, in a voice cracked with rueful laughter, "that when I was in the convent I had reached the point of believing that it was one of the laws of nature which was being accomplished in me! I said that love was like a plant, and if it got neither sunshine nor rain, it perished. I was not in the least happy over it, you know. But I became philosophical about it, and was glad, as one might be over something one owned which was not beautiful, but had a practical use. When I went into that place, you know, I honestly believed I should never come out of it again; and I used to read his old letters, and pore upon photographs of him, and play over and over all the music associated with him.