Now and then he persuaded himself that it would all be forgotten with any new change of circumstances; other women had been willing enough to forget--why not she? No one would ever know anything; the time was coming when he would marry her, and when they would begin to live out their lives together. He did her that grave injustice to believe that if the world prospered with him, and he could take her legitimately to his heart, she would be glad and relieved; he had no understanding of all her trembling fears at that time--no knowledge of the many hours when she wept in her bruised and troubled heart, and saw herself cut off from the rest of the world for ever, by reason of what she called her sin. She never spoke of it, because there was no one to whom she might speak; but she looked out on the world from that time with different eyes--with the eyes, sadly enough, of one who weeps for the might-have-been. Stories she had read and heard came back to her--old scraps of poems, forgotten, or but dimly understood until this time--poems that touched this, the greatest of all tragedies. She knew now how to class herself--was afraid of what any who had loved her might have said, had they known the truth about her. She grew afraid to pray; in one bitter moment of self-abandonment and shame was glad to think that Old Paul was dead. Old Paul--who had wondered once what love would do to her in the great world! And this had not been love; bitterly she declared that to herself again and again. She was of the stuff that would have walked barefoot through hell in the service of a man to whom her heart had been fully given; and lo! it had been her fate to fall in so poor a fashion as this. That was the shame of it in her eyes. She went once or twice to the house in which Jimmy lived. Not to see him, because she told herself that she was never to see him again; that, of all people in the world, he most of all must know nothing of her--must forget her. She never acknowledged to herself why that should be; she only thought of it with tears, many and many a time, as of something she had lost and could never regain. Jimmy, who was once to have said a word in a great crisis of her life--Jimmy, who had not said that word; he was the one above all others who must not know anything of this. Yet it was something of a comfort at that time to go to the house wherein he lived; even to stand in the cold streets, and look up at his windows and wonder what he was doing and how he fared. She found that she could say a prayer for him easily and earnestly, even while she could not pray for herself.