Umbrage soon discovered that this was not so easy after all. She had always lived in a home where the Shepherd’s presence and love were the predominant influences, and though she herself had so often been selfish and ungracious, the others had always reacted with love and forgiveness.

Now, however, she found herself in an environment where grace and true love and forgiveness were unknown. Moreover, she quickly discovered that she was not the mistress of her husband’s home at all. Far from it. His widowed mother, Old Mrs. Sullen, lived with them, and her influence over her son was undiminished. She ruled the household, and very quickly the relationship between selfish, self-willed Mrs. Sullen and her strong-willed and spoiled daughter-in-law was of the unhappiest kind. For days the old lady would not speak to her daughter-in-law at all, but kept to her own room, where, however, her son visited her and spent long hours listening to her complaints against Umbrage. It must be confessed, too, that in his wife’s company Resentment had to listen to almost equally bitter complaints against his mother, so that, between the two of them, there were times when he felt he had been much better off as a bachelor and that marriage was far from being an idyllic state. Umbrage was all too soon of the same opinion.

Secretly, in the depths of her heart, she had known perfectly well that she was making a mistake. Never would she forget the day when the Shepherd himself had told her so. Looking at her with his earnest, challenging, and yet compassionate eyes, he had told her just why she was doing it—because she insisted on evading the truth about herself instead of facing up to the actual facts. He had put before her the choice either of breaking the engagement with Resentment and going to the High Places with himself, or of going through with the marriage only to find her fellowship with himself broken and herself left completely unchanged.

Umbrage had fallen at his feet and said that she must, she simply must marry Resentment; that she could not live without love; that she had been so wronged and wounded that nothing else could satisfy her; that she was altogether too weak and wounded now to think of the High Places; that what she must have was love and sympathy and kindness and protection and a home of her own where she could forget the cruel treatment which she had endured; but that she would always be his follower, always.