“They ain’t nao need o’ my doin’ nothin’, ef yeou’d only hev some sense. But if yeou’re goin’ to be agin me, ther’s nao tellin’ what I won’t dew,” he answered with sullen terseness. They had come to the poplars, and Annie stopped at the stile under the thorns. “I shall have to leave you here,” she said. “Then yeh won’t hev me, ay? Yeh better think twice ’fore yeh say nao! Yeh won’t git another sich a chance--to live like a lady, ’n’ hev ev’rything yeh want. ’N’ ef yeh dew say nao, yeh kin rest ’sured yeh ain’t heerd th’ last of it, ner him nuther.” Milton’s little green-gray eyes watched her face intently, and he fingered his flaring plated watch-chain with nervous preoccupation. “What d’yeh say, yes’ ’r nao?” “I can’t say anything more than I have said--_now_,” she answered, and, stepping over the stile, left him. For a long time afterward Annie’s conscience debated the justification of that final word, the last one she ever addressed to Milton, and which was obviously intended to keep alive a hope that she knew to be absurdly without ground or reason. Sometimes even now she has momentary doubts about it--but she silences cavil by whispering to herself in unanswerable defence: “I thought then that possibly it might be needed to help Seth--perhaps even to save him.” She had little leisure just then, however, to devote to moral introspection, for Samantha met her, half-way down the thorn-walk, to excitedly tell her that her grandmother, Mrs. Warren, was very much worse than usual. CHAPTER XXXII.--“A WICKED WOMAN!” When Isabel looked into her mirror next morning, the image shown back fairly startled her. Day by day during this eventful week the glass had helped her to grow familiar with reddened eyes, with harsh, ageing lines, and with a pallor which no devices of the toilet could efface. It was not so much an added accentuation of these which riveted her gaze, now, upon the mirror, as the suggestion of a new face--of a stranger’s countenance, reflecting meanings and thoughts of the uncommon kind. She studied the face at first with an almost impersonal interest; then as the brain associated these lineaments with her own, and made their expression a part of her own spiritual state, she said to this other self in the glass, audibly: “Another week of this will make you an old woman.” She added, after a pause of fascinated yet critical scrutiny: “Yes, and a wicked woman, too!” There has been what one can only hope is an intelligible reluctance, from the beginning of this recital, to essay analysis or portrayal of Isabel’s thoughts and motives. A complex, contradictory character like hers, striving now to assimilate, now to sway the simple, straightforward, one-stringed natures with which it is environed, may be illustrated; it is too great a task to dissect it. Yet for the once we may venture to look into this troubled mind.