"You wouldn't say what my father does," she concluded miserably. "You wouldn't feel we have a right to the higher truth, if we feel great desires, great hungers the world wouldn't understand?" "I only know about facts," said Osmond again. "You see, I work in my garden all day, nearly every day in the year. I know I must sow good seed. I must nourish it. I know nature can't lie. I didn't suppose things were so incomprehensible out in the world--or so hard." "Haven't they been hard for you?" "For me!" He caught his breath, and immediately she knew how the question touched him. It was as monstrous as his fate. But he answered immediately and with a gentleness without reproach,-- "Things are different for me in every way. But I should have thought you would reign over them like a queen." "A queen! I have been a slave all my life. I see it now. A slave to other people's passions--Tom Fulton's cruelty, my father's greed." "His greed for money? I don't always understand you when you speak of him." "For money, power, everything that makes up life. My father is one great hunger. Give him the world and he would eat it up." Images crowded upon her. It seemed to her that here in the silence, with the spaces of the dark about her and that voice answering, her thought was generated like the lightning. "Do you see," she asked suddenly, "how I blame those two men, and not myself? I am the sinner. The sinner ought to own his sin. I don't know whether I have sinned or not. I believed in love, and because I believed in it, those two men betrayed me. That was how I was taught not to believe in anything." "Don't you believe any more?" "Oh, I don't know! I don't know!" It was a despairing cry. "There is kindness, I know that. Peter is kind. Your grandmother is the kindest person in the world. But that one thing I dreamed about--why, Osmond, that one thing was the most beautiful thing God ever made." "Tell me more about it." "You have thought about it, too. We can't be so much alike, you and I, and not have thought the same things." "Are we alike?" It was a wistful voice. She laughed, a little sorry laugh. "Well," she said, "at least we are in our playhouse together." "Ah!" He seemed to speak in spite of prudence. "That's not because we are alike. It is because we are different." But he went on at once, as if to keep her from interrogating that, or even perhaps remembering it. "I have forbidden myself to think of some things. When they came upon me, I went out and dug them into the ground." She was filled that night with an imperative sense of life. It made her forget even him and his claim to be heard. The great resolve in her to be for once understood was like a crowning wave drenching the farthest shore.