The pain was combined of many elements, too, and each hurt her in its own way. There was the shame of the thing, first, the burning, scarlet shame--the thought of it had a colour for her. John Ralston was disgraced in the eyes of all the world. Even the smooth-faced dandy, fresh from college, young Van De Water, might sneer at him and welcome, and feel superior to him, for never having gone so far in folly. Now if such men as Van De Water knew the story, it was but a question of hours, and all society must know it, too. Society would set down John Ralston as a hopeless case. Katharine wondered, with a sickening chill, whether the virtuous--like her father--would turn their backs on Ralston and refuse to know him. She did not know. But Ralston was her husband. The thought almost drove her mad. There was that condition of the inevitable in her position which gives fate its hold over men’s minds. She could not escape. She could not go back to the point where she had been yesterday morning, and begin her life again. As she had begun it, so it must go on to the very end, ‘until death them should part’--the life of a spotless girl married to a man who was the very incarnation of a disgusting vice. In those first moments it would have been a human satisfaction to have been free to blame some one besides herself for what she had done. But even now, when every bitter thought seemed to rise up against John Ralston, she could not say that the fault had been his if she had bound herself to him. To the very last he had resisted. This was Friday morning, and on the Wednesday night at the Thirlwalls’ he had told her that he could not be sure of himself. By and by, perhaps, that brave act of his might begin to tell in his favour with her, but not yet. The faces, the expressions, the words, of those from whom she had learned the story of his doings were before her eyes and present in her hearing now, as she lay wide awake in the early morning, staring with hot eyes at the cold grey ceiling of her room.