Then her thoughts went back to the happy week that lay behind her. She reviewed each day, hour by hour, and event by event. From that her restless mind leaped still farther back to the scene with Repellier, to that unspeakable hour of shame and despair. Then she went even farther back, to the very beginning, and step by step lived over her life, as she lay there, trying to shut out from her ears the maddening "Hurry-Hurry" of the wheels. She recalled the day that a tall, hollow-cheeked stranger came swinging up the path of her father's red-tiled home and inquired with his wistful smile if this was where the Rice who took in boarders lived. She remembered her sense of shame at her plain gingham dress, and how she had forgotten both shame and dress at the stranger's admiration of her yellow hair, twisted into a loose knot at the back of her head. "Why, child, it's a second Golden Fleece that should call for the outfit of a second Argo!" he had said to her, as though speaking to a girl not yet in her teens. That speech and that moment had marked the turning of all her life's tide. She was no longer the happy and petted belle of a little Kentucky village. She was a woman with aspirations toward the larger world of which he seemed a harbinger, of the knowledge and power of which he seemed an apostle. From that day innocence and content fell from her, leaf by leaf. Yet she remembered how she had clung to the lonely invalid, how for weeks together they had wandered about that far-away land of clover meadows and blue-tinted grasses, and sunsets made golden with gentle frosts. She remembered how she had labored with him on his Great Book, how his cough had grown faster than his manuscript, and how he had called for her when he was dying, and entrusted to her all his precious work, and wrung from her frightened lips the promise that she would copy it out, word for word, and when that task was finished take it herself to a publisher. She remembered how he had turned, then, and died in peace. She remembered her weeks of secret toil, her long, strange, first journey to New York, her trembling visit to the publisher, how later he had sent for her, and made her his dazzling offer--so unconsciously bewildering, so unconsciously tragical--on condition that she discard the masculine _nom de plume_ which he imagined a shrinking timidity had forced her to adopt, how he had enlarged on the advantages of the woman's name on the title-page, how he had unthinkingly paved the way for that first duplicity, how he was prepared to push the book, and in the end, he believed, make both her name and her fortune. She recalled that brief and most bitter struggle which took place within her, how she had gone back to her publisher still vacillating, how she had learned, when he had thrust his crisp, new check into her hand, how narrow one's ethical Rubicon can be, and how much one can suffer when once that narrow stream is crossed.