hearted. He had pledged himself to
Angela, giving her a ring, begging her to wait, writing her fulsome
letters of protest and desire. Now, after three years, to shame her
before her charming family--old Jotham, her mother, her sisters and
brothers--it seemed a cruel thing to do, and he did not care to
contemplate it.

Angela, with her morbid, passionate, apprehensive nature, did not fail
to see disaster looming in the distance. She loved Eugene passionately
and the pent-up fires of her nature had been waiting all these years the
warrant to express their ardor which marriage alone could confer.
Eugene, by the charm of his manner and person, no less than by the
sensuous character of some of his moods and the subtleties and
refinements of his references to the ties of sex, had stirred her to
anticipate a perfect fruition of her dreams, and she was now eager for
that fruition almost to the point of being willing to sacrifice
virginity itself. The remembrance of the one significant scene between
her and Eugene tormented her. She felt that if his love was to terminate
in indifference now it would have been better to have yielded then. She
wished that she had not tried to save herself. Perhaps there would have
been a child, and he would have been true to her out of a sense of
sympathy and duty. At least she would have had that crowning glory of
womanhood, ardent union with her lover, and if worst had come to worst
she could have died.

She thought of the quiet little lake near her home, its glassy bosom a
mirror to the sky, and how, in case of failure, she would have looked
lying on its sandy bottom, her pale hair diffused by some aimless motion
of the water, her eyes sealed by the end of consciousness, her hands
folded. Her fancy outran her daring. She would not have done this, but
she could dream about it, and it made her distress all the more intense.

As time went by and Eugene's ardor did not revive, this problem of her
love became more harrassing and she began to wonder seriously what she
could do to win him back to her. He had expressed such a violent desire
for her on his last visit, had painted his love in such glowing terms
that she felt convinced he must love her still, though absence and the
excitements of city life had dimmed the memory of her temporarily. She
remembered a line in a comic opera which she and Eugene had seen
together: "Absence is the dark room in which lovers develop negatives"
and this seemed