What would he think of her now? What could he think? Plainly he must consider her a cold, austere being, devoid of all feeling and appreciation. He had given her the best that was in him and had made bold enough to appraise her of it. Sincerity was manifest in his every gesture and word, and yet she had made him feel as if his protestations had been repugnant to her. She knew his nature, his extreme diffidence in matters of this kind, his power of resolution, and she feared that once having tried and failed, he was lost to her forever. And yet she knew that she grieved not for herself but for him. Her stern refusal had only caused him the greater pain. Stephen would, perhaps, misunderstand as he had misunderstood her in the past and it was the thought of the vast discomfiture she had occasioned in him that stung her with sorrow. Her warm, generous heart now chided her for her apparent indifference. There was no other name for it. What could he deduce from her behavior except that she was a cold, ungrateful, irresolute creature who did not know her own mind or the promptings of her own heart! She had flung him from her smarting and wounded, after he had summoned his entire strength to whisper to her what she would have given worlds to hear, but which had only confounded and startled her by its suddenness. And yet she loved him. She knew it and kept repeating it over and over again to her own self. No one before or since had struck so responsive a chord from her heart strings. There had been no other ideal to which she had shaped the pictures of her mind. Stephen was her paragon of excellence and to him the faculties of her soul had turned of their own mood and temper unknown even to the workings of her intellectual consciousness, like the natural inclination of the heliotrope before the rays of the rising sun. Laying her head in the crook of her elbow she sobbed bitterly. The thought that he was gone from her life brought inconsolable remorse. She knew him, knew the intimate structure of his soul, and she knew that a deep repentance would seize hold of him on account of his rash presumption. He would be true to his word: he would not breathe the subject again. Nay, more, he would ever permit her to disappear from his life as gradually as she had entered into it. This was unendurable but the consciousness that she had caused this bitter rupture was beyond all endurance still. She lifted her head and stared into the black depths of the night. All was still except the shrill pipings of the frogs as they sounded their dissonant notes to one another in the far-off Schuylkill meadows. They, too, were filled with thoughts of love, Marjorie thought, which they had made bold enough to publish in their own discordant way, and they seemed to take eminent delight in having the whole world aware of the fact that it, too, might rejoice with them.