“I will. When we began our conversation in Dorothy’s little porch, I was just beginning to be afraid that I might learn to love her. She had so suddenly matured, somehow. Her womanhood seemed to have come upon her as the sunrise does in the tropics without any premonitory twilight. It was the coming of serious duty upon her, I suppose that wrought the change. At any rate, with the outbreak of the fever, she seemed to take on a new character. Without losing her childlike trustfulness and simplicity, she suddenly became a woman, strong to do and to endure. And her beauty came too, so that I caught myself thinking of her when I ought to have been thinking of something else.” “Oh, yes,” Edmonia broke in. “I know all that and sympathize with it. You remember I found it all out before you did.” “Yes, I was coming to that. Perhaps I wandered from my story a bit--” “You did, of course. But under the circumstances I forgive you. Go on.” “Well, when you told me it was too late for me to save myself from loving Dorothy, I knew you were right, though I had not suspected it before. I hoped, however, that it might not be too late to save Dorothy from myself. I did not want to lure her to a life that was sure to bring much of trial and hard work and sympathetic suffering to her.” “But why not? Isn’t such a life, with the man she loves, very greatly the happiest one she could lead? Have you studied her character to so little purpose as to imagine--” “No, no, no!” he broke in. “I saw all that when I thought the matter out, after you left the camp that day. But at first I didn’t see it, and I didn’t want Dorothy sacrificed--especially to me.” “No woman is sacrificed when she is permitted to share the work, the purposes, the aspirations of the man she loves. How men do misjudge women and misunderstand them! It is not ease, or wealth, or luxury that makes a woman happy--for many a woman is wretched with all these--it is love, and love never does its work so perfectly in a woman’s soul as when it demands sacrifice at her hands.” Edmonia said this oracularly, as she sat staring into the fire. Arthur wondered where she had learned this truth, seeing that love had never come to her either to offer its rewards or to demand sacrifice at her hands. She caught his look and was instantly on her guard lest his shrewd gift of observation should penetrate her secret. “You wonder how I know all this, Arthur,” she quickly added. “I see the question in your face. For answer I need only remind you that I am a woman, and a woman’s intuitions sometimes serve her as well as experience might. Go on, and tell me what it was you planned before I wrote you concerning Dorothy’s case. What was the particular excuse you invented at that time for running away?” “It is of no consequence now, but I don’t mind telling you. I conceived the notion of freeing myself from the obligations that tie me here in Virginia by giving Wyanoke and all that pertains to it to Dorothy.”