He realized with a momentary qualm that the new situation must be avowed openly to justify the position which Euphemia would sustain in case Owen Haines should offer to relinquish, as a sacrifice to love, the pernicious practice of “prayin’ fur the power” in public. He recognized this step as a certain riveting of his chains; yet had he not been eager but a moment ago to assume them? And even now, as he looked down into her face, radiant with that joyous sense of supremacy in his heart, and seeming to him the most beautiful he had ever seen, the most tender, as it responsively looked up to his, he wondered that his untoward fate had so relented as to bestow upon him, in his forlorn exile, this creature, so delicately endowed, so choicely gifted, that even his alien estimate of values wrought no discord in the simple happiness that had come to him. And it was he who revealed to Jane Ann Sims the altered state of things when the two went presently back to the little cabin on the slope. There she sat in bulky oblivion of the things of this world, and especially the dish-pan. Her spectacles were awry on her nodding head. The dish-towel was limp in her nerveless hand. The tallow dip was guttering in the centre of the table, and about it the moths circled in fond delusions, regardless of the winged cinders that lay, now still, and now with a quiver of departing life, on the cloth. She made a spasmodic offer to resign the dish-towel to Euphemia, waving it mechanically at her with a fat, dimpled hand and a gesture of renunciation; but the girl, all unallured, passed without a word into the shed-room beyond, and the juggler sat down on the opposite side of the table with one elbow on it as he looked steadily across at Mrs. Sims’s face, which was all lined with the creases of fat that were usually dimples. She had roused into that half-dazed condition characteristic of the sudden and unwelcome termination of the sleep of fatigue, and the tallow dip swayed reduplicated before her eyes like a chandelier. Mentally she seemed no clearer of perception. Royce had realized her maternal fondness for him, ungratefully requited, and he could not altogether reconcile this with the agitated and alarmed mien with which she received his disclosure. “Marry Phemie!” she exclaimed in a sort of drowsy affright, as if her mental capacities had not yet laid hold on something that had roused her more alert apprehensions. He was irritated for a moment. He knew in his secret soul that he forswore much, overlooked much, bestowed much, in this mad resolution, and this knowledge, quiescent under the immediate influence of the girl’s beauty and charm and his loneliness, became tumultuously assertive in the society of Mrs. Sims. “Why not? I love her, and I want to marry her. Is there anything so astonishing in that?”