"Don't cry. Don't cry. I can't bear that. You mustn't say that you've taken anything from me. It isn't true. You've given me everything... everything. Why should we struggle any longer? Why shouldn't we take what has been given to us? Your husband doesn't care. I haven't anybody. Has God given me so much that I should miss this? And has He put it in our hearts if He didn't mean us to take it? I love you. I've loved you since first I set eyes on you. I can't keep away from you any longer. It's keeping away from myself. We're one. We are one another--not alone, either of us--any more...." She turned towards him. He drew her closer and closer to him. With a little sigh of happiness and comfort she yielded to him. * * * * * There was only one cloud in the dim green sky, a cloud orange and crimson, shaped like a ship. As the sun was setting, a little wind stirred, the faint aftermath of the storm of the day, and the cloud, now all crimson, passed over the town and died in fading ribbons of gold and orange in the white sky of the far horizon. Only Miss Milton, perhaps, among all the citizens of the town, waiting patiently behind her open window, watched its career. Chapter IX The Quarrel Every one has known, at one time or another in life, that strange unexpected calm that always falls like sudden snow on a storm-tossed country, after some great crisis or upheaval. The blow has seemed so catastrophic that the world must be changed with the force of its fall-- but the world is _not_ changed; hours pass and days go by, and no one seems to be aware that anything has occurred...it is only when months have gone, and perhaps years, that one looks back and sees that it was, after all, on such and such a day that life was altered, values shifted, the face of the world turned to a new angle. This is platitudinous, but platitudes are not platitudes when we first make our personal experience of them. There seemed nothing platitudinous to Brandon in his present experiences. The day on which he had received Falk's letter had seemed to fling him neck and crop into a new world--a world dim and obscure and peopled with new and terrifying devils. The morning after, he was clear again, and it was almost as though nothing at all had occurred. He went about the town, and everybody behaved in a normal manner. No sign of those strange menacing figures, the drunken painter, the sinister, smiling Hogg; every one as usual. Ryle complacent and obedient; Bentinck-Major officious but subservient; Mrs. Combermere jolly; even, as he fancied, Foster a little more amiable than usual. It was for this open, outside world that he had now for many years been living; it was not difficult to tell himself that things here were unchanged. Because he was no psychologist, he took people as he found them; when they smiled they were pleased and when they frowned they were angry.