ly aloof.

In these days it was hard for Boone to see, with his single purpose
shattered, the reason or value of any purpose, yet habit held him to his
routine duties with an overserious and humourless inflexibility.

After the first dull wretchedness of the night when he and Anne had
parted, he had laid hold upon a hope which had not endured. He had told
himself with the persistence of a refrain that the girl who had that
night condemned him out of hand was a girl temporarily bereft of
reasoning balance by a tide of heartache and a tempest of anger. The
mail would soon bring him a note announcing the restoration of the woman
he loved to her own gracious fairness and serene self-recovery. He could
not, without losing his whole grip on life, bring himself to the
admission that the passion of a wild, ungenerous moment would endure.
Indeed, the thought of what she must have suffered--what she must still
be suffering--so to carry her and hold her outside her whole orbit of
being, tortured him as much as his own personal loss and grief.

But no word had come. That wild, hurried interview had moved with such
torrential haste and violence to its culmination of breached
understanding that there had been no time for stemming it with
moderation or explained circumstances.

She had not had the chance to tell him of the disclosures her father had
made, or of the sense of bondage that had weighed upon her until the
colour of her thought had lost its clarity and become bewilderingly
turgid. She had not been able to let the light into the festering
brooding that had subconsciously poisoned her mind. A single idea had
carried all else with it as a flood carries wreckage. For years she had
stood out for Boone. A time had come when he had been charged with
absolute duplicity toward her, and she had scornfully wagered her life
on his fealty and submitted the whole vital matter to one question. His
answer had been a confession.

There had been no years of intermittent association when he could
logically or decently have entertained another love affair. From the
first day of his avowed allegiance until now there had been no break in
his protestations. Therefore, the word "yes" or "no" contained all the
answer there could be to the question of his loyalty, and the word which
shattered the whole dream came from his own lips.

One day, as Boone was leaving his hotel room for the state house, two
letters were handed him, and his heart lea