to his art, blindly and instinctively. He would go to
Paris now and study his paintings, five, ten years, and come back at
last a great artist, when these same people who had cast him off would
be proud to receive him. Turner was right in saying that he had in him
the making of a great man. He _knew_ that she was right; knew that if he
only gave the better part of him, the other Vandover, the chance, that
he would become a great artist. Well, he would do so, and then when he
came back again, when all the world was at his feet, and there were long
articles in the paper announcing his arrival, these people would throng
around him; he would show them what a great and noble nature he really
had; he would forgive them; he would ignore what they had done. He even
dramatized a little scene between himself and Turner, then Mrs. Haight.
They would both be pretty old then and he would take her children on his
lap and look at her over their heads--he could almost see those heads,
white, silky and very soft--and he would nod at her thoughtfully, and
say, "Well, I have taken your advice, do you remember?" and she was to
answer, "Yes, I remember." There were actually tears in his eyes as he
saw the scene.

At the very first he thought that he could not live without Turner; that
he loved her too much to be able to give her up. But in a little while
he saw that this was not so. She was right, too, in saying that he had
long since outlived his first sincere affection for her. He had felt for
a long time that he did not love her well enough to marry her; that he
did not love her as young Haight did, and he acknowledged to himself
that this affair at least had ended rightly. The two loved each other,
he could see that; at last he even told himself that he would be glad to
see Turner married to Dolly Haight, who was his best friend. But for all
that, it came very hard at first to give up Turner altogether; never to
see her or speak to her again.

As the first impressions of the whole affair grew dull and blunt by the
lapse of time, this humble penitential mood of Vandover's passed away
and was succeeded by a feeling of gloomy revolt, a sullen rage at the
world that had cast him off _only_ because he had been found out. He
thought it a matter of self-respect to resent the insult they had put
upon him. But little by little he ceased to regret his exile; the new
life was not so bad as he had at first anticipated, and his relations
with the m