All that he had not seen and heard and guessed before was now wholly
revealed to him. He was permitted to see deep into the pure soul of
the girl, into her very heart that was brimming over with love for
him. His name came riding on every breath. It was Philip, Philip,
Philip! And bit by bit, and fragment by fragment, he heard all the
pitiful story of her love, of her petty stratagems, of the wicked
little plot she had made, of the traps from which he had extricated
himself, of the pretended sprain in her ankle, of her watching and
waiting, of the anguish he had caused her, of her solitary communion
with the stars on Mount Avalanche, of her dismissal of Hillyer, of her
faith in the love that should not be denied and unrequited, of her
prayers for a miracle that should bring him to her at last.

He looked down at the poor, small foot in its ragged shoe; yes, that
was the foot that was "sprained." And how it had trudged, and dragged
itself along for him, when every bone and muscle of her body ached! He
looked at her hands, thin even in their swollenness, raw and bleeding,
hard as a laborer's on the palms. How they had toiled and bled for
him! For him! And what about him? What about Philip Haig?

He leaned back from her, and closed his eyes. And suddenly it seemed
as if something fell away from them, as if something that had bound
and imprisoned and blinded him had been rudely shattered. In one
terrible, torturing revelation he saw clearly what he had been, what
he had done, what a miserable wreck he had made of life, what a
pitiable, dwarfed, misshapen thing his soul had become in comparison
with the soul of this girl whom he had despised. He saw that he had
lived a life of almost untouched egoism, setting his own wrongs above
all the other wrongs in the world, counting his own griefs the
greatest of all griefs, nursing his own tragedy as if it had been the
first tragedy and the last. Bitterly, remorselessly he reviewed his
selfishness, his hatred, his senseless rage, the heartlessness wrought
by himself in a nature that had been, in the beginning, as pure, if
not as precious and fine and beautiful, as hers.

And that was not all. He had taken woman for the special object of his
hatred. He had made himself believe that all women were alike. Was
there, then, only one kind of woman in a world filled with many kinds
of men? Because he had been a fool, because he had been deceived by
one woman, he had concluded, in his fol