"Stay with me, sister," she prayed. "Sister, do not go! What--what can I say?"

"Naught," was the steady answer. "There is naught to be said. You were always a woman--I was never one--till now."

She rose up from her chair and threw up her arms, pacing to and fro.

"I am a desperate creature," she cried. "Why was I born?"

She walked the room almost like a thing mad and caged.

"Why was I thrown into the world?" striking her breast. "Why was I made so--and not one to watch or care through those mad years? To be given a body like this--and tossed to the wolves."

She turned to Anne, her arms outstretched, and so stood white and strange and beauteous as a statue, with drops like great pearls running down her lovely cheeks, and she caught her breath sobbingly, like a child.

"I was thrown to them," she wailed piteously, "and they harried me-- and left the marks of their great teeth--and of the scars I cannot rid myself--and since it was my fate--pronounced from my first hour- -why was not this," clutching her breast, "left hard as 'twas at first? Not a woman's--not a woman's, but a she-cub's. Ah! 'twas not just--not just that it should be so!"