It was the thought of those tears for the home-coming of Eaton which would storm me down and have me captive for all I might barricade with pen and ink. What should they proclaim? That Peg was unhappy, truly, since folk do not weep for mirth. In a way I was daunted of my honor as I went about these thoughts; it seemed a trustless thing to dwell on Peg and her wedded life. And I would fight against it; and still it pinned and held me. In the last of it I was claimed by the conclusion that Peg found existence grievously dark, for what else should be headwaters for those tears? Also, I resolved that I would coldly look the question of her grief in the face; it might turn the better for both of us to lay hands upon its cause. I was given the more courage for this scrutiny since I had not forgotten how Peg named me to be her only confidant; that word put a trust upon me and made my question-asking a kind of duty. As thread by thread I lifted up the inquiry of Peg's sorrow, the truth would begin to make itself plain to me. Eaton was something gross, and mayhap in his finer senses not unnumbed of the bowl. He could not value Peg--she, a perfumed spirit thing of music and color and fire and light! And Peg would feel his lack of appreciation; it would wring her heart, stab her like a dagger. Verily, I came by a great freshness when now I was on the right scent of it. This, it was, to lie at the root of her meaning when she showed me that vine trailing its rich beauties along the ground, instead of climbing, and said, “I am like that vine.” The prone and earth-held soul of Eaton offered her no trellis. And so Peg mourned her lost estate of love! And why should she not mourn? she, thus swindled of a rightful destiny! Peg shone a thing of beauty to deck a heaven with; and here was she fated to be the jewel in the dulled head of a toad! Why should her sorrow find rebuke? Born to be the reason of admiration and to feed on it as a flower feeds on the sun, the irony of accident had flung her into this chill corner of neglect. And her love was dying--starving away its life. Peg did not love Eaton; the yoke galled her--yoking her as it did to one who, while perhaps owning the affections, the integrity, the loyalty, owned also the low unelevation of the brute. And for that, Peg would stay behind when Eaton went away and weep to see him coming. While, with some fondness for the argument--since it would make for Peg's exoneration--I was moving to these conclusions, it ran abruptly over me how, during our first talk in the parlors of the Indian Queen, Peg's eyes would seem to swim in love for Eaton. I recalled her cry of pain when she feared he might be shamed for her, and how she said she would sooner die than that. Then, surely, Peg must have loved him; nor had he changed since then.