"Jim Airth."

To this Lady Ingleby replied on the following day.

"DEAR JIM,

"I shall always want you; but I could never send unless the coming would
mean happiness for you.

"I know you decided as you felt right,

"I am quite well.

"God bless you always.
"MYRA."

CHAPTER XX

A BETTER POINT OF VIEW

In the days which followed, Jim Airth suffered all the pangs which come
to a man who has made a decision prompted by pride rather than by
conviction.

It had always seemed to him essential that a man should appear in all
things without shame or blame in the eyes of the woman he loved.
Therefore, to be obliged suddenly to admit that a fatal blunder of his
own had been the cause, even in the past, of irreparable loss and sorrow
to her, had been an unacknowledged but intolerable humiliation. That she
should have anything to overlook or to forgive in accepting himself and
his love, was a condition of things to which he could not bring himself
to submit; and her sweet generosity and devotion, rather increased than
soothed his sense of wounded pride.

He had been superficially honest in the reasons he had given to Myra
regarding the impossibility of marriage between them. He had said all the
things which he knew others might be expected to say; he had mercilessly
expressed what would have been his own judgment had he been asked to
pronounce an opinion concerning any other man and woman in like
circumstances. As he voiced them they had sounded tragically plausible
and stoically just. He knew he was inflicting almost unbearable pain upon
himself and upon the woman whose whole love was his; but that pain seemed
necessary to the tragic demands of the entire ghastly situation.

Only after he had finally left her and was on his way back to town, did
Jim Airth realise that the pain he had thus inflicted upon her and upon
himself, had been a solace to his own wounded pride. His had been the
mistake, and it re-established him in his own self-respect and sense of
superiority, that his should be the decision, so hard to make--so
unfalteringly made--bringing down upon his own head a punishment out of
all proportion to the fault committed.

But, now that the strain and tension were over, his natural honesty of
mind reasserted itself, forcing him to admit that his own selfish pride
had been at the botto