face to face for the first time with the ugly skeleton which lies
hidden beneath the most beautiful of dreams. The spring had passed in a
troubled rapture; and it was on one of the bright, warm days in early
June that she found awaiting her on the hall table when she came in from
her walk a letter addressed in a strange handwriting and bearing a
strange foreign postmark. Beside this was a note from Kemper explaining
a broken engagement of the day before; and she read first her lover's
letter, which ended, as every letter of his had ended since the
beginning of their love, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

With an emotion which repetition could never deaden, she stooped to kiss
the last sentence he had written, before she turned carelessly to take
up the strange foreign envelope, which she had thrown, with her veil and
gloves, on the chair at her side. For a moment she pondered
indifferently the address; then, almost as she broke the seal, the first
words she read were those which lay hidden away in the love letter
within her hand, "Yours with my whole heart and soul, Arnold."

In her first shock, even while the blow still blinded her eyes, she
turned to seek wildly for some possible solution; and it was then that
she discovered that the letter, in Kemper's handwriting, was addressed
evidently to some other woman, since it bore the date of a day in June
just three years before she had first met him. Three years ago he had
declared himself to belong, heart and soul, to this other woman; and
to-day, with no remembrance in his mind, it seemed, of that former
passion, he could repeat quite as ardently the old threadbare avowal.
How many times, she asked herself, had he used that characteristic
ending to his love letters?--and the thing appeared to her suddenly to
be the veriest travesty of the perfect self-surrender of love.

She was a woman capable of keen retrospective jealousy, and as she sat
there, beaten down from her winged ecstasy by the blow that had struck
at her from the silence, she told herself passionately that her life was
wrecked utterly and her brief happiness at an end. Then, with that
relentless power of intellect, from which her emotions were never
entirely separated, she began deliberately to disentangle the true facts
from the temporary impulses of her jealous anger.

"I am wounded and yet why am I wounded and by what right?" she demanded,
with a pathetic groping after the self-condemnati