“And Alden--you know Alden, Mr. Cahill?--well, he’s rather brutal, sometimes--thinks only of his art--and he told her one day that she was particularly fortunate to have had a great trouble in her life, and that it would do more for her voice than ten years of training. You ought to have seen how she looked at him! But men _are_ brutal; it was a man who made her suffer first. She only told me part of the story, I don’t quite understand, but I know it nearly broke her heart, young as she was, and that she will never get over it or be the same again. I am not sure,” went on the girl thoughtfully, “it was before she came to Boston, but I don’t know the details, and of course I could ask no questions. She met him quite a while ago, out West, I believe, where she lived, and she thought he loved her, he led her to believe so, and she loved him, I know. He must have been quite different from the men she had known. He had everything and she nothing. It was a sort of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid episode, only the king was not kingly at all, and when the time came for him to go, he left her quite calmly.” Her face was flushed now and her eyes wide open and shining with the indignation she felt. It struck Cahill again that she was the handsomest girl he had ever seen, and he liked her so--aroused and animated--even better than coldly beautiful. He was not listening very much to what she was saying, but he was watching her quietly and intently, the nobly poised head and low forehead with the hair growing so beautifully on it, and the rounded chin and firm, rather square jaw. As he looked at her the conviction was borne in upon him that she was a girl who would be capable of entire devotion or utter renunciation, and that she would be implacable if her confidence were once destroyed. “It must be a fine thing for a man to do,” she went on, scornfully, “to make a girl love him and believe him nobler, and better, and stronger than he is, and then to undeceive her so cruelly! And a girl like this one, too! That was the worst of it. It is bad enough when the girl and the man have equal chances--when they know each other’s weapons and skill, and when they can retire gracefully and before it is too late, or when they are already so scarred up that one wound more makes no difference. But when the advantages are all on one side--when one is so much stronger than the other! It may be because I am so fond of this girl, or it may be because I am even yet unused to the world’s ways, and the four years spent in college and away from such things may have made me super-sensitive, but however it may be, it seems a despicable thing to me!” She stopped short, and the indignation and scorn in her voice rang out sharply. Cahill moved uneasily and looked around him. He had been so absorbed in watching the girl’s face that he had hardly taken in what she had been saying, but in some vague way he felt jarred and restless.