Vera did not think of Society in that tragic hour of an awakened conscience. That which would have been the first thought with most women had no place in her mind. It was of her sin that she thought--the sin of inconstancy, of ingratitude, of faithlessness. Had she crossed the border line, and qualified herself for the Divorce Court, she could not have thought of herself with deeper contrition. To love this other man better than she loved her husband; to long for his coming; to be happy when he was with her, and miserable when he was away; there was the sin. But no word of love had been spoken. There was time for repentance. He did not know that she loved him. Although, looking back, and recalling words and tones of his, she could not doubt that he loved her, she could hope that no word of hers had revealed the passion whose development had been gradual and imperceptible as the growth of the leaf buds in early spring, which no eye marks till they flash into life in the first warmth of April. Her friendship with this man, who was of her kindred, the companion of the only happy days of her childhood, had seemed as natural as it would have been to attach herself to a brother from whom she had long been separated. She had welcomed him with a childish eagerness, she had trusted him with a childish belief in the perfection of the creature who is kind. She had admired him--comparing him with all the other young men she knew, and finding him infinitely above them. His very weakness had appealed to her. All that was wanting in his character made him more likable, since compassion and regret mingled with her liking. To be so clever, so gifted by nature, and to have done nothing with nature's gifts--to be doomed to go down to death leaving his name written in water--to die, having finished nothing but his _beaux jours_: people who liked him best talked of him as a young man with a _beau passé_. Shoulders were shrugged, and smiles were sad, when his painter friends discussed him. "We thought he was going to do great things in art, and he has done nothing." Soldiers who remembered him before he left the Army lamented the loss of a man who was made for a soldier. There had been trouble--trouble about a woman that had made him exchange to a line regiment--and then the war being over, and the chance of active service remote, disgust had come upon him, and he had done with soldiering. Vera had seen the shoulders shrugged, and had heard the deprecating criticism of this kinsman of hers, and had been all the kinder to him because Fate had been cruel. She had tried to fire him with new hope; she had been ambitious for him; had steeped herself in art books, and spent her mornings in picture galleries, in order that she might be able to talk to him. She had implored him to go back to his work, to paint better pictures than he had painted when critics prophesied a future from his work. "I am too old," he said.