was you who
bewitched me--not the wife for whose sake I fought against what I
thought infatuation for you. I loved--I love you only, you as you
are--not the poor little girl of the Commercial House."

"Is it true?" she questioned sadly, incredulous.

"It is true, Mary. I love you."

"I have loved you always," she said softly between barely parted
lips--"always, Hugh. Even when I thought you dead.... I did believe that
you were drowned out there, Hugh! You know that, don't you?"

"I have never for an instant questioned it."

"It wouldn't be like you to, my dear; it wouldn't be you, my Hugh....
But even then I loved the memory of you.... You don't know what you have
meant in my life, Hugh. Always, always you have stood for all that was
fine and strong and good and generous--my gentlest man, my knight _sans
peur et sans reproche_.... No other man I ever knew--no, let me say
it!--ever measured up to the standard you had set for me to worship.
But, Hugh--you'll understand, won't you?--about the others--?"

"Please," he begged--"please don't harrow yourself so, Mary!"

"No; I must tell you.... The world seemed so empty and so lonely, Hugh:
my Galahad gone, never to return to me.... I tried to lose myself in my
work, but it wasn't enough. And those others came, beseeching me,
and--and I liked them. There was none like you, but they were all good
men of their kind, and I liked them. They made love to me and--I was
starving for affection, Hugh. I was made to love and to be loved. Each
time I thought to myself: 'Surely this time it is true; now at last am I
come into my kingdom. It can't fulfil my dreams, for I have known the
bravest man, but'--"

Her voice broke and fell. Her eyes grew dull and vacant; her vision
passed through and beyond him, as if he had not been there; the bitter
desolation of all the widowed generations clouded her golden face. Her
lips barely moved, almost inaudibly enunciating the words that were
shaken from her as if by some occult force, ruthless and inexorable:

"Each time, Hugh, it was the same. One by one they were taken from me,
strangely, terribly.... Poor Tom Custer, first; he was a dear boy, but I
didn't love him and couldn't marry him. I had to tell him so. He killed
himself.... Then Billy Hamilton; I became engaged to him; but he was
taken mysteriously from a crowded ship in mid-ocean.... A man named
Mitchell Thurston loved me. I liked him; perhaps I might have consented
to marry him.