"
"It would have, were I the woman your words imply. I had nothing to gain
by marrying you, nothing! Nothing--that is--but--but--what you are
unable to see." And then, so suddenly that Truedale could not stop her,
Lynda almost ran from the room.
For an hour Truedale sat in her empty shop and waited. He dared not seek
her and he realized, at last, that she was not coming back to him. His
frame of mind was so abject and personal that he could not get Lynda's
point of view. He could not, as yet, see the insult he had offered,
because he had set her so high and himself so low. He saw her only as
the girl and woman who, her life through, had put herself aside and
considered others. He saw himself in the light such a woman as he
believed Lynda to be would regard him. He might have known, he bitterly
acknowledged, that Lynda could not have overlooked in her pure woman
soul the lapse of his earlier life. He remembered how, that night of his
confession, she had begged to be alone--to think! Later, her
silence--oh! he understood it now. It was her only safeguard. And that
once, in the woods, when he had blindly believed in his great joy--how
she had solemnly made the best of the experience that was too deep in
both hearts to be resurrected. What a fool he had been to dream that so
wrong a step as he had once taken could lead him to perfect peace.
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