"I loved him ... all the love I had I gave him. It's not the same now, of course; its wings are broken, but it is his. Once you've given you can't take it back again." "But he--he has no claim on you now. Sarah, do you need to marry him?" "I am married to him." "But, Sarah ... look here, Sarah, it isn't true that I have never loved. I didn't love the man I was married to, but I have learned something about love; I've learned that marriage without it is a thing no self-respecting woman should go into." "Love," said Sarah, "is a thing that once you've gone into, binds you by something that grows out of it that is stronger than love itself. Olivia, I am bound ... if you want to know, I'd rather be bound to--to Leon Lawrence by that tie than to the dearest love without it. Oh, Olivia, can't you see, can't you understand that I have to do _right_ ... that the way I see things there's a law ... not a civil law but a law of loving that goes on by itself; and being faithful to it is better to me than loving. You must see that, Olivia." "I see that this is the happiest thing for you and I'll not put anything in your way, Sarah." I kissed her. What, after all, does one soul know of another. It came to me as an extenuating circumstance when I looked him over the next morning, that Mr. Lawrence wouldn't live long enough to do her any particular harm. He had been so little of a man always to me, so much less so now, eaten through as he was by poverty and sickness, that I could never understand how he happened to be the vehicle of that appealing charm which even as I looked, drew me over to his side in something like a sympathetic frame. I could see that he regarded me anxiously, and I thought it to his credit to be able to realize that there might be somebody not absolutely delighted at his marrying Sarah. But it wasn't, as I learned later, any sense of his shortcomings that waked in his eye toward me. He was lying on the sofa in our little parlour, for the shock of the encounter had been too much for the abused and broken thing he was. Sarah had gone out, to consult Jerry, I believed about their marriage;--she wouldn't have asked me knowing how I felt about it. Griffin looked up at me with the old formless demand on my consideration. "You've never told her, have you?" "Told what?" On my part it was genuine amazement. "About us, you know ... there in Chicago." He dropped his eyes; something almost like a blush of shame overcame him. I stared. "Good heavens, Griff, I'd forgotten it." "Oh, well, I didn't know--some women----" He stopped, embarrassed by my sheer credulity of its having anything to do with his relation to Sarah. "I told you I was a bad lot," he protested, "but I swear that since my wife died and I could come back to her, I've been straight. You believe that, don't you?"