"I don't know how it is with other girls, but always I dreamed of love, always after my first childhood. I thought of kings and queens, knights and ladies. They walked in pairs and loved each other." "What did you mean by love?" "Each would die for the other. That was my understanding of it. I knew the time would come some day when a beautiful young man would say to me, 'I would die for you,' and I should say to him, 'And I would die for you.' It was a kind of dream. Maybe it would not have been, except that I was never much of a child when I was a child. I had ecstatic times with my father, but I was lonesome. The lover was to change that, when he came." "When did he come?" "He came several times, but either he was too rough and he frightened me, or too common and he repelled me, or--" "And Tom Fulton came!" "Yes, walking just the right way, neither too fast nor too slow, and all chivalry and honor. Oh, my heart! my heart!" She was sobbing to herself. There was a long pause. "So you married him," Osmond reminded her. "Osmond!" At last she had said his name. She knew it with her mind, but how did her heart have it so ready? To him it seemed natural that she should use it, until he thought of it next day. She continued in that hurried voice that pleaded so, "I must make you see how I had thought of those things always." "What things, dear child?" "Loving and being loved. It was like your plants, coming to flower. There was to be one person who would give me a perfect devotion. There would be music and dancing and bright weather, day after day, year after year. That was coming to flower, like your plants." "A rose in bloom!" he murmured. "It was a kind of possession with me. I can't tell you what hold it took on me. There were years when I tried not to have a wrong thought or do an ugly act, so that I could be beautiful to him when he came." "Behold, the bridegroom cometh!" mused the voice, in involuntary comment, as if it responded to the man's own wondering mood. "He came. He made himself irresistible to me. He knew my father first." "Were they friends?" "My father has no friends--not as you would understand it. He touches people at one little point. They think they have everything; but it is nothing. Still, they understood each other. My father sold me to him." There was silence from the darkness under the tree; only she heard him breathe. "I was to blame, too," she cried. "But I did not see it then. I truly did not see it. My father told me it was nobler and purer to go with my lover so. Marriage, he said, had been profaned a million, million times. Where was the sacrament, he asked, in a church that was all rotten? He told me so, too--Tom Fulton. I went with him. I never married him." She paused for the answering voice, but it delayed. The silence itself constrained her to go on. "Do you know what Tom Fulton was?" "He was a handsome beast."