"No one," thought Mrs. Stoddart, "but Annette would have left me all these months believing the worst had happened--not because she was concealing the truth purposely, but because it did not strike her that I could regard her as innocent when she did not consider herself so." "It is not the same as if you had," said Mrs. Stoddart sternly. "If you mean to do a good and merciful action, and something prevents you, is it the same as if you had done it? Is anyone the better for it?" "No." "Well, then, remember, Annette, that it is the same with evil actions. You were not actually guilty of it. Be thankful you were not." "I am." "When I saw you that first night at Fontainebleau, I thought you were on the verge of brain fever. I never slept for thinking of you." "Well, you were right," said Annette tranquilly. "I suppose that is what you nursed me through. But that night I had no idea I was ill." "You were absolutely desperate." "Was I? I was angry. I must never be angry like that again. Dick said that, and he was right. Do you know what I was thinking of when you came out to me with the milk? Once, long ago, when I was a child, I was sent to a country farm after an illness, and I saw one of the farm hands moving some faggots. And behind it on the ground was a nest with a hen, a common hen, sitting on it, and a little baby-chicken looking out from under her wing. She was just hatching them out. I was quite delighted. I had never seen anything so pretty before. And the stupid men frightened her, and she thought they were coming for her young ones. And first she spread out her wings over them, and then she became angry. A kind of dreadful rage took her. And she trod down the eggs with her great feet, the eggs she had sat patiently on so long; and then she killed the little chickens with her strong beak. I can see her now, standing at bay in her broken nest with her bill streaming, making a horrible low sound. Don't laugh at me when I say that I felt just like that old hen. I was ready to rend everything to pieces, myself included, that night. When I was a child I thought it so strange of the hen to behave like that. I laughed at her at the time--just as Dick laughed at me. But I understand her now--poor thing." CHAPTER VII "The larger the nature the less susceptible to personal injury." It was a few days later. Annette, leaning on Mrs. Stoddart's arm, had made a pilgrimage as far as the low garden wall to look at the little golden-brown calf on the other side tethered to a twisted shrub of plumbago, the blue flowers of which spread themselves into a miniature canopy over him. Now she was lying back, exhausted but triumphant, in her long chair, with Mrs. Stoddart knitting beside her. "I shall be walking up there to-morrow," she said audaciously, pointing to the fantastic cactus-sprinkled volcanic hills rising steeply behind the house on the northern side.