his rival, not to his own love and his own tenderness.

"It turns me almost sick," he declared, "to think of you with him."

She let go his hand, moved away, and sat down. "If you're like that, I
can say no more," she said. Her eyes were full of tears as she looked at
him, but his heart was hard to her; to him she seemed to be humiliating
both him and herself; the victory of Quisante at once insulted him and
degraded her. Here was a case where Alexander Quisante, with all his
defects, would have gone right, while Marchmont went wrong. It was a
crisis, and Quisante's insight would have taught him how to handle it, to
assure her that whatever she did he would be the same to her, that though
he might not understand he would be loyal, that his love only grew
greater with his pain, that in everything that awaited her he would be
ready with eager service and friendship unimpaired. None of this came
from Marchmont's lips; he made no effort to amend or palliate his last
bitter speech. He could not conquer his resentment, and it bred an
answering resentment in her. "You must think what you like of me," she
said, her voice growing cold again.

With the end of this interview, with the departure of Marchmont, still
sore, angry, and blind to her point of view, May felt that the matter had
settled itself. She knew in her heart that she would not have turned
Marchmont away unless she had meant to bid Quisante come. For a little
while she struggled against finality, telling herself that the question
was still an open one, and that to refuse one man was not of necessity to
marry another. Other friends came and talked to her, but none of them got
within her guard or induced her to speak freely to them. In the end she
had to settle this thing for herself; and now it was settled.

Even when undertaken in the conviction of a full harmony of feeling, a
community of mind, and an identity of tastes, marriage may startle by the
extent of its demands. She was to marry a man--she faced the matter and
told herself this--a man from whom she was divided by the training of a
lifetime, by antagonisms of feeling so acute as to bite deep into their
every-day intercourse, by a jarring of tastes which made him sometimes
odious to her. In spite of the resentment to which Marchmont's scorn had
stung her, she understood very well how it was that her friends failed to
appreciate the motives of her action. To herself she could not justify
it; it was taken on