er loved her," concluded Mrs. Caldwell when he had gone.
"There was a moment when he looked as if--but he's never loved Sheila.
If he'd loved her--ever--he would have told me."

CHAPTER XIII

Had Mrs. Caldwell seen Peter pacing the floor of his little hotel room
that night, she would have been less certain that he did not love
Sheila. She had said to him, "There's nothing so tragic as the
truth--when it comes too late!" And it was this tragedy with which
Peter grappled now.

He had not known that he loved Sheila until Mrs. Caldwell told him that
he should have married her; but those words had been for him a
revelation; an illumination of the last ten years and more. Suddenly
he saw, as if a searchlight had been flung upon them, the innermost,
secret depths of his own heart--saw them filled with the image of
another man's wife. So swiftly, so entirely without warning had
self-knowledge dawned upon him that the cry had been wrung from him,
"Why do you tell me this now--when it is too late?" But after the one
betraying exclamation, he had put all his strength into the attempt to
conceal his discovery. Mrs. Caldwell had spoken of the honor of her
generation as of a thing that had not survived, in its purity, to a
later one. Yet Peter's sense of honor was too scrupulous to permit him
the confession to anyone that he loved another's wife. To the single
end of concealment he had set himself through the rest of that
interview. He had gone through it as through some nerve-racking
nightmare, struggling for self-control as one struggles for safety in
dreams of horrid peril.

He must not admit that he loved Sheila! He must not admit that he
loved her! That was what he had told himself over and over, fighting
all the while for the mastery of his face, his voice, lest they
proclaim what his lips did not utter.

Yet in spite of the struggle, in spite of the sense of awful calamity,
of absolute wreckage, that had descended upon him, he had been keenly,
piteously conscious of every word that Mrs. Caldwell had said; and he
had realized fully the impossibility and the irony of the task she had
imposed upon him.

Having failed to marry Sheila himself, he must now undertake to keep
her in love with the man who had married her! This was all which was
required of him; this was _all_! His devotion to Mrs. Caldwell had not
faltered; but now, facing his tragedy alone and in the freedom to
suffer, he felt a great bitter