head the damnation of the world. At each side of her an adamant parent held her rigidly to the bar of judgment. An ant crawled upon her neck, but she dared not move. She lowered her eyes before the congregation—a hundred-eyed Cerberus that watched the gates through which her sins were fast thrusting her. Her soul was filled with a delirious, almost a fanatic joy. For she was out of the clutch of the tyrant, Freedom. Dogma and creed pinioned her with beneficent cruelty, as steel braces bind the feet of a crippled child. She was hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, strait-jacketed, silenced, ordered. When they came out the minister stopped to greet them. Mary could only hang her head and answer “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” to his questions. When she saw that the other women carried their hymn-books at their waists with their left hands, she blushed and moved hers there, too, from her right.
She took the three-o’clock train back to the city. At nine she sat at the round table for dinner in the Café André. Nearly the same crowd was there.
‘‘Where have you been to-day?” asked Mrs. Pothunter. “I ’phoned to you at twelve.”
“I have been away in Bohemia,” answered Mary, with a mystic smile.
There! Mary has given it away. She has spoiled my climax. For I was to have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which
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