Therefore to run--yes, run and hide from further knowledge, further experience and revelation, to claim the privileges, since she was called on to endure the smart, of isolation .-- Yet to run, as she almost directly began to reason, was not only cowardly but useless.

Fact remains fact, and if she refused to accept it, range herself in line with it to-day, she in nowise negatived but merely postponed the event.

If not to-day, then to-morrow she was bound to empty the cup.

And she laughed at the specious half-truth which had appeared so splendid and exhilarating a discovery--the half-truth that nothing is really inevitable unless you yourself will it to be so.

For this was inevitable, sooner or later unescapable, fight against it, fly from it as she might.
Therefore she must stay, whether she liked it or not--stay, because to do otherwise was purposeless, because she couldn't help herself, because there was nowhere to run to, in short-- She heard footsteps upon the flags outside the garden door, speech, calm and restrained, of which she could not distinguish the import.
Mechanically Damaris gathered the scattered house-keeping books lying before her upon the table--baker's, butcher's, grocer's, corn-chandler's, coal-merchant's--into a tight little heap; and, folding her hands on the top of them, prayed simply, almost wordlessly, for courage to hold the balance even, to seek not her own good but the good of those two others, to do right.