No longer unchoosing, her heart had spoken its choice. It were better had it never spoken at all; but there could be no mistaking its decree—she loved Evans Rutledge. As she had looked upon the three men who loved her in that brief time when Helen proclaimed her husband, _she had known_: and she had known that not for her was the man who in the fleetest moment could smile while her heart was breaking; nor for her that other, who, with his alien point of view, was untouched with her distress, and who with his perfect breeding—she resented it—could be so contained, so unmoved, in a situation which brought anguish to her. In the throes of that anguish her soul had turned, unerring, to its affinity in suffering, to _the heart that understood_ and wept, not in a ready sympathy for her pain, but in the pains of a common grief. In such manner Elise accounted for the reading of her heart’s message. She believed that it had been undecipherable, confused, until that evening. Yet in all her distress then, and in the heartaches afterward resulting from its choosing, she was strangely happy because her heart had been true to the fancy of its earlier years, had been faithful to its first girlish inclination to love, had not misled her, had not been fickle in any degree, or false. She told herself with a tremor of rapturous, prideful humility that one man had been the master of her love from the beginning. Thinking on it as she lay unsleeping through the night, she more than once forgot her tears and was lost in the transport of loving. She petted and caressed her heart for its constancy. She made excuses for its indecision in that long time when the man’s love had seemed unworthy. She murmured tender things to it because it had prevailed, even though with a hesitating loyalty, against her head’s capricious disapproval. In her wanderings back and forth through the desert of her miseries on that night, she straggled back many times to this oasis of her love and stopped to soothe her troubled heart with its upspringing freshnesses.... And yet a wildness of perplexity was set about her, and she could not find a way out. She knew that Rutledge loved her—had loved her from the time he declared it on the flood-beaten rock in the St. Lawrence till the moment of his tender unspoken good-night three hours ago. That his love could not be shaken by any act not her own, she verily believed. But would he have loved her?—would he have dared to love her?—could he, with his blood-deep, immutable ideas, _could_ he have loved her?—if he had known that his love would bring him to this unspeakable extremity, to this heart-breaking dilemma, where he must be traitor to himself and to her—or become brother-in-law to a negro?