t years
before, and you know how well Jack keeps all his promises."

"Jack is faithful and true," I said, looking at her keenly. "No one will
ever be able to say of him, 'That man has wronged me.'"

"What did he say about me?" she demanded suddenly, stopping short in
her walk and facing me. "I shall have no disguises with you, Floyd: you
know me too well. I never really loved Jack, good, kind and noble
although I recognize him to be. When he offered me my freedom I took it.
How could I have endured to wait for him, ruined, disgraced as he was,
through the uncertainty and pain of years? It is impossible that he
should be in a position to marry until my youth is passed."

Her voice was so tremulous and pleading, her eyes and lips so eloquent,
that she needed no vindication. I pitied Jack more than ever, but still
I no longer blamed her.

"You men have a hundred chances," she went on. "If the first fails you,
you have no reason for despondency, for a better one is sure to come. We
poor women find our golden opportunity but once. Do not call me
mercenary or false. I was neither. I had been talked into a belief that
I ought to marry Jack, but when the trial came all the potential reasons
failed. Had I kept my engagement to him, I should have been a clog, an
encumbrance, upon him: he is better off without me."

"Nothing but devoted love could have held you to him in his trouble,"
said I. "If you did not feel that, your bondage through a hopeless
engagement would have been a terrible burden."

"Tell me what he said," she murmured coaxingly. "Is he angry with me?
does he complain of me?"

"No: no man could have spoken of you more kindly."

"Is he forgetting me?"

I met her look and smile with a curious thrill that I thought I had
lived down years ago.

"I am afraid, Georgy," said I, "that you are not one of those women whom
men forget."

"Jack will forget me. He is wedded to his business: he is angry with the
world, maddened, desperate. I have walked out behind him at church in
Belfield, and he has not seen me: I have met him driving in the streets,
and he has not turned his head. The men who once trusted and believed
in his father treated him shamefully after his misfortunes came, and
Jack resented it: he goes about the place seeing nobody, holding his
head high, and showing the men he meets that he asks no favor of any one
of them. All the softness has gone out of him."

I told her how wrong her idea of him was