"Too late! If you take a white flower and inhale its perfume, and then carelessly drop it where hurrying crowds are sure to trample it into the dust, what hope that, search as you may, you will ever find it, or, finding it, be able to restore the torn, soiled, ruined petals? Wherever she is, no matter what she has become, what sin and shame stain and defile her, she is my wife. I swore before God I would take her for my wife, 'for better, for worse,' and though it is my fault--and mine only--that I did not publish the marriage, I have kept my vows, and am dedicated to life-long celibacy. My boyish cowardice--what awful shipwreck it has made of two lives! You want the details? It is a shameful story, but not long. In the early summer of my nineteenth year I spent vacation in the far Northwest, at an advanced army station, Post ----, where father was in command of his regiment. Hunting was fine but dangerous, as Indians on the frontier were ugly just then, and several tribes were painting for the war path. One hot afternoon, tramping back to camp with my rifle on my shoulder, I went down a steep, wooded hill to drink at a spring, and as I parted the thick growth I saw a cow chewing her cud, while a bare-footed girl stooped and milked into a cedar pail. She sprang up, much alarmed, and stood against a glowing background of scarlet rhododendrons. Her calico bonnet had fallen off, her sleeves rolled up showed her white, dimpled arms, and all over her head and shoulders the gold-colored hair was twisted into little curls and waves and tendrils that glittered like gilt wire. As she stared at me with large purplish-blue eyes, her bright red lips trembled, and--" He paused, and involuntarily wrung his thin white hands.