on which would acquit
her lover, "he has lived his life, I know--I have always known it--and
his letter has only brought forcibly before me a fact which I have
accepted though I have not faced it." And it occurred to her, with the
bitter sweetness of a consoling lie, that he could not have been false
to her three years ago, since he was not then even aware of her
existence. To dwell on this thought was like yielding to the power of
an insidious drug, and yet she found herself forcing it almost
deliriously against her saner judgment. "How could he wrong me so long
as I was a stranger to him?" she repeated over and over. "On the day
that he first loved me, his old life, with its sins and its selfish
pleasures, was blotted out." But her conscience, even while she
reasoned, told her that love could possess no power like this--that the
man who loved her to-day, was the inevitable result of the man who had
loved other women yesterday, and that there was as little permanence in
the prompting of mere impulse as there was stability in change itself.
So the voice within her spoke through the intolerable clearness of her
intellect; and in her frantic desire to drown the thing it uttered, she
repeated again and again the empty words which her heart prompted. Yet
she knew even though she urged the falsehood upon her thoughts, that it
was less her argument that pleaded for Kemper than the memory of a look
in his face at animated instants, which rose now before her and appealed
disturbingly to her emotions.

Three ways of conduct were open to her, she saw plainly enough. Wisdom
suggested that she should not only put the letter aside, but that she
should banish the recollection of its existence from her life. But,
while she admitted that this would be the most courageous treatment of
the situation, she recognised perfectly that to act upon such a decision
was utterly beyond her strength. Though she were to destroy the object,
was the memory of it not seared indelibly into her brain? and would not
this memory return to embitter long afterward her happiest moments?
"When he kisses me I shall remember that he has kissed other women and I
feel that I shall grow to hate him if he should ever write to me again
in those lying words." But she knew intuitively that he would use the
same ending in his next letter, and that she would still be powerless to
hate him, if only because of his disturbing look, which came back to her
whenever she attemp