For a while she stood listening to the ring of
metal against stone that came to her more and more faintly out of
the mist, and she wondered if it was really June Tolliver standing
there, while father and brother and cousin were on their way to
fight the law--how differently she saw these things now--for a man
who deserved death, and to fight a man who was ready to die for
his duty to that law--the law that guarded them and her and might
not perhaps guard him: the man who had planted for her the dew-
drenched garden that was waiting for the sun, and had built the
little room behind her for her comfort and seclusion; who had sent
her to school, had never been anything but kind and just to her
and to everybody--who had taught her life and, thank God, love.
Was she really the June Tolliver who had gone out into the world
and had held her place there; who had conquered birth and speech
and customs and environment so that none could tell what they all
once were; who had become the lady, the woman of the world, in
manner, dress, and education: who had a gift of music and a voice
that might enrich her life beyond any dream that had ever sprung
from her own brain or any that she had ever caught from Hale's?
Was she June Tolliver who had been and done all that, and now had
come back and was slowly sinking back into the narrow grave from
which Hale had lifted her? It was all too strange and bitter, but
if she wanted proof there was her step-mother's voice now--the
same old, querulous, nerve-racking voice that had embittered all
her childhood--calling her down into the old mean round of
drudgery that had bound forever the horizon of her narrow life
just as now it was shutting down like a sky of brass around her
own.
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