the very earth. She would not look at
him, would not make semblance to have heard. And he, without hesitation,
went deliberately to the door and let himself out. He gained the street
without being intercepted, and drew a long breath of relief when he felt
the soft night air playing on his heated brow. The moralist would have
said that he came off victor; but he had a sense, as he went out along
the pavement, of being only a defeated and degraded man. There was not
even the excitement of gratified vanity, for an offered love which did
not include perfect trust in his honor was an insult in itself. And
Caspar Brooke's integrity of soul was dear to him.

It was perhaps impossible for him--a mere man--to estimate the extent of
suffering to which his scorn had subjected the woman that he left
behind. Rosalind remained as he had seen her, crouching on the ground,
with her head on the sofa cushions, for full two hours or more. When she
rose she went to her own room and lay upon her bed, refusing for many
hours either to eat or to speak. She did not sleep: she lay broad awake
all night, recalling every tone of Caspar's voice, and every passing
expression of his face. She was bitterly humiliated and ashamed. But she
was not ashamed in the sense of shame for wrong-doing: she was only
ashamed because he had rebuffed her. She was sick with mortification.
She had offered him everything in her power--peace, safety, love: she
had offered him _herself_ even, and been rejected with scorn. Nothing
crushes a woman like this humiliation. And in some women's natures such
an experience will produce dire results; for loss of self-respect is
resented as the worst injury that man can inflict, and is followed by
deadly hatred to the man who has inflicted it. It may be argued by the
more logical male that the woman has brought it all upon herself; but no
affronted, humiliated, shame-stricken woman will ever allow this to be
the fact. The sacrifice she conceives to have been all her own; but the
pain has come from _him_.

This was the way in which Rosalind looked at the matter. And mistaken as
she was in her view of the moralities and proprieties of the situation,
she suffered an amount of pain which may well arouse in us more pity
than Caspar Brooke felt for her. The burning, stinging sense of shame
seemed to make her whole soul an open wound. It was intolerable. The
only way out of it, she said to herself at first, is to die. There was
an old s