as no boy whose feelings she had played with, whose
respect she had forfeited; it was a man, and one who had expected to
find in this Eastern society a perfection of delicacy and refinement not
elsewhere seen. I scorned myself for having loved her, and for the
moment I scorned all women too. Then it was, Anne, that the thought of
_you_ saved me. I said to myself that if you would be my wife, I could
be happy with your fresh sincerity, and not sink into that unbelieving,
disagreeable cynicism which I had always despised in other men. Acting
on the impulse, I asked you.

"I did not love you, save as all right-minded men love and admire a
sweet young girl; but I believed in you; there was something about you
that aroused trust and confidence. Besides--I tell you this frankly--I
thought I should succeed. I certainly did not want to be repulsed twice
in one day. I see now that I was misled by Miss Vanhorn. But I did not
see it then, and when I spoke to you, I fully expected that you would
answer yes.

"You answered no, Anne, but you still saved me. I still believed in you.
And more than ever after that last interview. I went away from Caryl's
early the next morning, and two days later started for the West. I was
hurt through and through, angry with myself, disgusted with life. I
wanted to breathe again the freedom of the border. Yet through it all
your memory was with me as that of one true, pure, steadfast woman-heart
which compelled me to believe in goodness and steadfastness as
possibilities in women, although I myself had been so blindly befooled.
This is what you, although unconsciously, have done for me: it is an
inestimable service.

"I was not much moved from my disgust until something occurred which
swept me out of myself--I mean the breaking out of the war. I had not
believed in its possibility; but when the first gun was fired, I started
eastward at an hour's notice." Here Dexter rose, and with folded arms
walked to and fro across the floor. "The class of people you met at
Caryl's used to smile and shrug their shoulders over what is called
patriotism--I think they are smiling no longer."--(Here Anne remembered
"After that attack on Fort Sumter, it seemed to me the only thing to
do") "but the tidings of that first gun stirred something in _my_ breast
which is, I suppose, what that word means. As soon as I reached
Pennsylvania, I went up to the district where my mines are, gathered
together and equipped all the v