Ailsa Paige. Chambers Robert William

      Ailsa, you'll agree with me."

      "Are you utterly without human feeling?" she demanded. "Because, if you are, there isn't the slightest use of my pretending to be civil to you any longer."

      "Have you been pretending?"

      "I suppose you think me destitute of humour," she said, "but there is nothing humourous about patriotism and self-sacrifice to me, and nothing very admirable about those who mock it."

      Her cheeks were deeply flushed; she looked straight ahead of her as she walked beside him.

      Yet, even now the swift little flash of anger revealed an inner glimpse to her of her unaltered desire to know this man; of her interest in him—of something about him that attracted her but defied analysis–or had defied it until, pursuing it too far one day, she had halted suddenly and backed away.

      Then, curiously, reflectively, little by little, she retraced her steps. And curiosity urged her to investigate in detail the Four Fears—fear of the known in another, fear of the unknown in another, fear of the known in one's self, fear of the unknown in one's self. That halted her again, for she knew now that it was something within herself that threatened her. But it was his nearness to her that evoked it.

      For she saw, now that her real inclination was to be with him, that she had liked him from the first, had found him agreeable—pleasant past belief—and that, although there seemed to be no reason for her liking, no excuse, nothing to explain her half-fearful pleasure in his presence, and her desire for it, she did desire it. And for the first time since her widowhood she felt that she had been living her life out along lines that lay closer to solitude than to the happy freedom of which she had reluctantly dreamed locked in the manacles of a loveless marriage.

      For her marriage had been one of romantic pity, born of the ignorance of her immaturity; and she was very young when she became the wife of Warfield Paige—Celia's brother—a gentle, sweet-tempered invalid, dreamy, romantic, and pitifully confident of life, the days of which were already numbered.

      Of the spiritual passions she knew a little—of the passion of pity, of consent, of self-sacrifice, of response to spiritual need. But neither in her early immaturity nor in later adolescence had she ever before entertained even the most innocent inclination for a man. Man's attractions, physical and personal, had left only the lightest of surface impressions—until the advent of this man.