I nodded grimly. “People always thought he would never marry--he used to say so himself,” she went on, still absently. I burst out: “The--hound!” “_Oh!_” she exclaimed. I started up, our eyes met, and hers filled with tears of reproach and understanding. We sat looking at each other in silence. Two of the tears overflowed, hung on her lashes, melted down her cheeks. I continued to stare at her shamefacedly; then I got to my feet, drew out my handkerchief, and tremblingly, reverently, as if I had touched a sacred image, I wiped them away. My love-making went no farther. In another moment she had contrived to put a safe distance between us. She did not want to turn a boy’s head; long since (she told me afterward) such amusements had ceased to excite her. But she did want my sympathy, wanted it overwhelmingly: amid the various feelings she was aware of arousing, she let me see that sympathy, in the sense of a moved understanding, had always been lacking. “But then,” she added ingenuously, “I’ve never really been sure, because I’ve never told anyone my story. Only I take it for granted that, if I haven’t, it’s _their_ fault rather than mine....” She smiled half-deprecatingly, and my bosom swelled, acknowledging the distinction. “And now I want to tell _you_--” she began. I have said that my love for Mrs. Hazeldean was a brief episode in our long relation. At my age, it was inevitable that it should be so. The “fresher face” soon came, and in its light I saw my old friend as a middle-aged woman, turning grey, with a mechanical smile and haunted eyes. But it was in the first glow of my feeling that she had told me her story; and when the glow subsided, and in the afternoon light of a long intimacy I judged and tested her statements, I found that each detail fitted into the earlier picture. My opportunities were many; for once she had told the tale she always wanted to be retelling it. A perpetual longing to relive the past, a perpetual need to explain and justify herself--the satisfaction of these two cravings, once she had permitted herself to indulge them, became the luxury of her empty life. She had kept it empty--emotionally, sentimentally empty--from the day of her husband’s death, as the guardian of an abandoned temple might go on forever sweeping and tending what had once been the god’s abode. But this duty performed, she had no other. She had done one great--or abominable--thing; rank it as you please, it had been done heroically. But there was nothing in her to keep her at that height. Her tastes, her interests, her conceivable occupations, were all on the level of a middling domesticity; she did not know how to create for herself any inner life in keeping with that one unprecedented impulse.