"Poor, dear, little girl! It's hard for you, but you must try to understand. You've lived in a very sheltered little corner, dear, where the difficult things of life have been hidden away out of sight. It's hard for you to be quite fair, and see the other point of view as well as your own. But you must try. You mustn't condemn poor Dane. He was engaged to you, and he has fallen in love with another woman. It sounds bad enough on the face of it, but you and I who know him, and have watched him these last months, know that there has been nothing deliberate about it, nothing guilty or underhand. He was engaged to you and he was faithful to you--in intent. He wanted to be faithful. The other thing was just a great trial wave which overtook him and swept him off his feet." Teresa set her lips, her face hard and cold. "It could not have swept him, if he had been firm! If he had been faithful to me, he could not have noticed any other woman in that way. I never noticed another man. I don't understand it." Grizel sighed. The youthful arrogance of the girl was at once pitiful and menacing. To her there existed but the two hard lines, a right and a wrong, the maze of intersecting paths had no existence in her eyes. Her judgment, like that of all young untried things, was relentlessly hard. Grizel sat looking at her, pondering what to say. "When you first knew Cassandra you were fascinated by her. You felt a longing to see her again. Every time you saw her, you admired her more. You have told me about it, so often. In a feminine way you fell in love with her yourself, Teresa. You _ought_ to understand." "He was engaged to me!" echoed Teresa obstinately. Suddenly her face quivered with pathos "And--I'm young--I'm pretty.--I loved him. _Why_? Why? Why?" "Oh, my poor child!" Grizel cried sharply, and the tears started to her eyes. Poor, ignorant, complaisant Teresa fighting against the mysteries of life, demanding explanation of the inexplicable,--what tenderness, what forgiveness was to be expected from such an attitude? "He chose me," she insisted. "It was his own doing. Nobody made him. It was his own choice. And he had met her _before_ he asked me. We used to talk about her together.--I was glad when he was enthusiastic... She was my friend, and a married woman with a husband and--that big boy! He is ten years old. She must be thirty at the least." All the arrogance of the early twenties rang in Teresa's voice. "It's such folly--such madness! It isn't as if she could ever--love him back." Silence. Teresa looked up sharply, held Grizel's eyes in a hard, enquiring stare and deliberately repeated the pronouncement. "It isn't possible that she could care for him." "Did you find it so difficult, Teresa?" "Why do you compare her with me? It's different. You know it's different."