The finding of the boy and the interview with Mrs. Cassidy broke down the last of Gault's hopes. He now knew that Viola had intentionally fled from him. At first, when no word came from her, and Mrs. Robson's description of her as ill was fresh in his mind, he had a terrible fear that she might have died. But a later judgment convinced him that had this been the case he would have heard from the colonel. Viola was living--hiding somewhere from him, restraining her father from communicating with him, which, Gault knew, would be the old man's wish and intention. And now, with the blankness of her absence deadening his heart, for the first time he began to understand what she must have thought and felt--began to see the situation with her eyes. He thought of her, loving and believing in him as he knew she had always done, suddenly waking to the knowledge that he had suspected her. He saw her living over again those conversations in which he had half revealed his groundless doubts, had tried to find confirmation of them in the halting admissions of her puzzled ignorance. And with her comprehension of the light in which he had been regarding her came that _coup de grâce_ of all doubts in his favor--the giving of the money. With a clearness of vision that was like clairvoyance, he seemed to be able to read down into the depths of her consciousness, to see into the hidden places of the nature he had once thought so jealously secretive. In the gnawing bitterness of his remorse he realized that she had believed herself tricked, that the hand she had thought stretched to her in kindly fellowship in reality concealed a trap. Where she had looked for protection, support, and love, she had found what now presented itself to her as a sinister and cruel craftiness. Her best friend had turned out to be her most unrelenting enemy. In the loneliness of that long summer he came face to face with despair. He had lost her by his own mad folly. Remorse for the wrong he had done her alternated in his thoughts with an unquenchable longing to see her again. His heart craved for her, even if only for a single moment's glimpse. A younger man would have shaken off the gloom of his first great disappointment, have told himself that there were other eyes as sweet and hearts as true. But with him the elasticity of youth was gone. There was no forming of new ties, no delight in fresh faces. Life had offered him supreme happiness, and he had let it pass by him. Like the base Indian, he had "thrown a pearl away richer than all his tribe."