“And I would have loved him if I could.” Peg waved her hand with an accent of despair, and as one who had striven and failed beyond recall. “But I could not--could not; strive as I might, love would not come. I felt guilt to live with him; I was glad when he sailed away; and, God help me! my sighs over his death were the sighs of one released from bonds.” Peg broke and cried like any child. You should understand, however, that she was unjust to herself. What she said of her brooding aforetime to the frontier of the morbid was over-true. And, supersensitive, proud, her hope had wasted as her gloom grew; her griefs of girlhood, enlarged many fold doubtless, as she herself suspected, by stress of her own fancy sorrowing with a wound, had left solemn stamp upon her; and this took far too often and unjustly the shape of self-blame. Beneath all, and hidden deep within her breast, Peg carried small opinion of herself; thought herself selfish, hard, shallow, and of no rich depth of heart. She was wrong to the core; for her inner self was as beautiful as her face. And yet, despite knowledge on her own part, and her friends' assurances, in the ultimate recesses of her thoughts there existed a torture-chamber; and therein she ever racked herself as the one wrongdoer in what she had passed through. There was no driving her from this; she was merciless against herself; and while none not the closest might know, for in the presence of non-friends and strangers she showed the iron fortitude of an Indian or a soldier, to myself and those with whom she practiced no reserve these self-flagellations were much too painfully plain. I say, folk near to Peg were aware of this morbid lack of soul-vanity and good regard for herself. There should be one exception counted, and that, curious to tell, her own husband. Peg, for all he might be double her age, and I think no very handsome man at that, I could see, when I talked with her, loved Eaton as she loved her eyes or mothers love their children. And yet, never to him did she show her true feeling; in his presence she was the brave, gay, bright, strong, brilliant Peg, asking in the fight which followed no quarter and granting none, she seemed to the common world. It is curious, and presents a problem too involved for my solution, that Peg should have guarded against the one she most loved and shut the door upon discovery by him of her own wondrous self. Yet so it was; it stood patent to me from the beginning that Eaton knew no more of Peg than of her whom he never met. In her morbid estimates of her worth it is possible she feared to grant him too clear a view. She may have thought she would lose by it. The reason, however, for this great secrecy coupled with great love--this hiding from him for whom she would have died--I shall leave to be searched for by those scientists of souls who are pleased to explain the inexplicable. For myself, I confess I was baffled by it.