She rose and began to walk about the room, touching first one object and then another with restless fingers; the thought of freedom was like wine, it went to her brain; the vision of the divorce court, the lawyers, the judges, the newspapers, floated into space. She stretched her clasped hands high above her head and drew a long breath, her soul almost shouted for joy. Freedom! It was, next to happiness, the desired of the gods! And after all did not one involve the other, was not one absolutely essential to the other? She wondered, with a smile, why they talked so much cant about marriage and divorce? Had they suffered as she had suffered they would rejoice, as she did, at the thought that there were divorces, that one could be free again! Free--good heavens! Not to see him every day, not to hear his voice, with that mean, trivial rasp in it, not to be one of his chattels! And Rose? Margaret did not allow herself to dwell too long upon that vision of the girl’s young figure, her fair, animated face against the background of the cedars and the sky. Was she jealous of her? That was an ignominy too deep to contemplate without bitter self-abasement; she refused to believe it! The shuddering certainty which had drained the life-blood from lip and cheek became now, on reflection, a fancy of her feverish brain. Such a raw, simple creature as Rose was no mate for William Fox; that indisputable attraction of opposites, which is one of the laws of nature, for a moment lost its significance in her eyes; she would not believe it. It was not quite natural for her, though, to take this view, even for a moment, for a woman, as a rule, has less faith in the endurance of a man’s love than he has in it himself, because she has usually discovered that the heart of the ordinary male creature is uncommonly like a pigeon-cote! She was determined to forget all these things; she walked to and fro battling with herself, her restless hands sometimes at her throat and sometimes clasped behind her head. The strong passion of rebellion which shook her being amazed even herself. She would never give him up! She could not--to Rose or to any one; her starved heart cried out against surrender and defeat, he was hers--_hers_.