It was perhaps impossible for him--a mere man--to estimate the extent of suffering to which his scorn had subjected the woman that he left behind. Rosalind remained as he had seen her, crouching on the ground, with her head on the sofa cushions, for full two hours or more. When she rose she went to her own room and lay upon her bed, refusing for many hours either to eat or to speak. She did not sleep: she lay broad awake all night, recalling every tone of Caspar's voice, and every passing expression of his face. She was bitterly humiliated and ashamed. But she was not ashamed in the sense of shame for wrong-doing: she was only ashamed because he had rebuffed her. She was sick with mortification. She had offered him everything in her power--peace, safety, love: she had offered him _herself_ even, and been rejected with scorn. Nothing crushes a woman like this humiliation. And in some women's natures such an experience will produce dire results; for loss of self-respect is resented as the worst injury that man can inflict, and is followed by deadly hatred to the man who has inflicted it. It may be argued by the more logical male that the woman has brought it all upon herself; but no affronted, humiliated, shame-stricken woman will ever allow this to be the fact. The sacrifice she conceives to have been all her own; but the pain has come from _him_. This was the way in which Rosalind looked at the matter. And mistaken as she was in her view of the moralities and proprieties of the situation, she suffered an amount of pain which may well arouse in us more pity than Caspar Brooke felt for her. The burning, stinging sense of shame seemed to make her whole soul an open wound. It was intolerable. The only way out of it, she said to herself at first, is to die. There was an old song that rang in her ears continually, as if somebody were repeating it over and over again. She could not remember it all--only a line here and there. "When lovely woman stoops to folly," it began, what art can wash her tears and stains and shame away? And the answer was what Rosalind herself had already given: the only way "to rouse his pity" was "to die!" She almost laughed at herself for repeating the well-worn, hackneyed, century-old ditty. People did not die now-a-days, either of broken hearts or of chloral, when their lovers deserted them. And Caspar Brooke had never been her lover. No, he had only given her pain; and she wished that she could make him suffer, too. "Revenge" was too high-flown a word; but if she could see him heartbroken, ruined, disgraced, she would be--not satisfied, but she would feel her pain allayed.