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 evi-
dently 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 him-
self 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 character-
istic 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-condemnation which would ac-
quit 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

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