.

She covered her face with her hands.

"I know you are worth all that I think you are," he continued. "But I am
afraid that just now I am too interested in my own salvation to think of
you at all correctly."

"Yes," she observed wearily.

She was thinking of Philip as he had comforted her that morning, and his
tenderness, compared to this cold statement from Lawrence, seemed
attractive beyond measure. She admitted that all hope of Lawrence's
loving her was dead, and she said to herself: "It is what I wanted. I
can go back to my husband." But she did not want to go back to Howard.
She received this discovery calmly. She would never go back. But why
shouldn't she? She could not tell for certain. She thought it was
because she had found herself unworthy, but deep within her was the
knowledge that she no longer loved him. It would be useless to go back
to him in any event. He could never be the same to her after hearing of
her long months with this blind man in the wilderness.

What months they had been! She thought them over, day by day, and she
saw what might have been a great joy sink, after a glimpse, into utter
darkness. Before her she saw the endless gray years beside Philip. Yes,
she would stay with him. At least he loved her, and she could help him.
If she did not love him, what of it? She would be an able wife to him.
She could keep him from ever knowing that her heart was away with
Lawrence, who would be back in the world at home and have forgotten her.

"Claire!" Lawrence was speaking. "We have certainly reaped a strange
harvest from our months of sowing in the wilderness."

"Yes."

"Whatever brought it about?"

"I don't know."

"Perhaps it was fate, that you should teach me where I stand in life."

"Perhaps."

"And perhaps you, too, will find that I have been of some value when we
are separated."

"It may be."

"I wish things might have gone differently."

"They didn't."

"No, and they can't. Well, let them be as they are."

"I guess we'll have to, Lawrence."

A few minutes later, when she looked at him, he was asleep.

CHAPTER XV.

UTTER EXHAUSTION.

Claire rose and slipped quietly to her own bed. All the aching pain of
her proposed future came over her with its dirty sordidness. She could
never stand it, she thought, and clenched her teeth. Well, it was not
necessary. When Lawrence was gone, there was the lake. That would be her
way out of it all. No one need ever know. T