How could she have stooped to have done such a thing: to ask a
man . . . oh! the shame of it, the shame of it all! How could she have
been so blind as to think that such a man was worthy! . . .

In the midst of her whirlwind of passion came a solitary gleam of relief:
she knew with certainty that she did not love Leonard; that she had never
loved him. The coldness of disdain to him, the fear of his future acts
which was based on disbelief of the existence of that finer nature with
which she had credited him, all proved to her convincingly that he could
never really have been within the charmed circle of her inner life. Did
she but know it, there was an even stronger evidence of her indifference
to him in the ready manner in which her thoughts flew past him in their
circling sweep. For a moment she saw him as the centre of a host of
besetting fears; but her own sense of superior power nullified the force
of the vision. She was able to cope with him and his doings, were there
such need. And so her mind flew back to the personal side of her
trouble: her blindness, her folly, her shame.

In truth she was doing good work for herself. Her mind was working truly
and to a beneficent end. One by one she was overcoming the false issues
of her passion and drifting to an end in which she would see herself face
to face and would place so truly the blame for what had been as to make
it a warning and ennobling lesson of her life. She moved more quickly,
passing to and fro as does a panther in its cage when the desire of
forest freedom is heavy upon it.

That which makes the irony of life will perhaps never be understood in
its casual aspect by the finite mind of man. The 'why' and 'wherefore'
and the 'how' of it is only to be understood by that All-wise
intelligence which can scan the future as well as the present, and see
the far far-reaching ramifications of those schemes of final development
to which the manifestation of completed character tend.

To any mortal it would seem a pity that to Stephen in her solitude, when
her passion was working itself out to an end which might be good, should
come an interruption which would throw it back upon itself in such a way
as to multiply its malignant force. But again it is a part of the Great
Plan that instruments whose use man's finite mind could never predicate
should be employed: the seeming good to evil, the seeming evil to good.

As she swept to and fro, her raging spirit