“No,” he said. “She left me. She saw before I did that it couldn’t go on. She saw in me the ambition that I thought I had buried in my love for her. She knew that if I stayed with her, I’d never be anything but a miserable shyster, living from hand to mouth, despising myself and all I did, coming perhaps in time to hate her because she had been the cause of my degradation. She went to Judge McLaurin, and asked him to tell her the truth. He told her, old Covenanter that he was. Then she went up the mountain to Boyce and asked him if he wanted her to come back to him. She knew that it was the only action I’d consider final. He told her to come. She told me that she was leaving me. I pleaded with her all that night, but she went with the dawn. I couldn’t hold her. I went up Pisgah with her till we came to the trail to Boyce’s cabin. We could see the wood smoke curling up above the masses of shining green leaves and pink clusters of the laurel. ‘You’re going away from me,’ she said, ‘far away, and you’ll climb a higher mountain than Pisgah.’ I begged her to come with me, but she shook her head. ‘I’m giving you up for your sake,’ she told me. ‘But you need me,’ I pleaded. ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘But some day I shall, and then I’ll call you. And no matter where you are, you’ll come, won’t you, Burt?’ I promised her that I would. The last I saw of her was as she climbed the trail to Boyce’s cabin. From that day to this”--he touched the crumpled little white letter--“she has sent me no word.” “It’s strange, isn’t it,” Rhoda said, her voice not quite steady, “that a woman may live with a man through long years and never really know him at all?” “Should I have told you?” “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I’d have married you, even if you had. It’s not deception, perhaps, when you’ve never seen her nor written to her since you married me; and yet---- Are you going to her, Burt?” “To-morrow’s the conference. I must be there if I am to be the man chosen.” “Do you want to go?” “I wonder,” he mused, “if you’ll understand me when I tell you that, other things being equal, I should go to-night. It’s with no sense of failing you, and with no idea of helping her, but I promised her--that I’d come if she called.” “Even if there weren’t the conference,” Rhoda said, “you’re a marked man now. You couldn’t go back to a little village in the mountains without it being known and the reason for it blazoned. It wouldn’t do, would it?” She could not quite succeed in making her tone judicial. Her own eagerness palpitated back of the assumed impartiality. “You’ve wanted the presidency too long to throw away the chance of it.” “I’ve never wanted it,” he said. “You don’t mean,” she demanded, her vexation rising into view, “that I’ve urged you to seek something you haven’t desired?”