Now Enid Maitland hated the woman who had enjoyed the first young love of the man she herself loved. She hated her because of her priority of possession, because her memory yet came between her and that man. She hated her because Newbold was still true to her memory, because Newbold, believing in the greatness of her passion for him, thought it shame and dishonor to his manhood to be false to her, no matter what love and longing drew him on. Yet there was a stern sense of justice in the bosom of this young woman. She exulted in the successful battle the poor woman had waged for the preservation of her honor and her good name, against such odds. It was a sex triumph for which she was glad. She was proud of her for the stern rigor with which she had refused to take the easiest way and the desperation with which she had clung to him she did not love, but to whom she was bound by the laws of God and man, in order that she might not fall into the arms of the man she did love, in defiance of right. Enid Maitland and this woman were as far removed from each other as the opposite poles of the earth, but there was yet a common quality in each one, of virtuous womanhood, of lofty morality. Natural, perhaps, in the one and to be expected; unnatural, perhaps, and to be unexpected in the other, but there! Now that she knew what love was and what its power and what its force--for all that she had felt and experienced and dreamed about before were as nothing to what it was since he had spoken--she could understand what the struggle must have been in that woman's heart. She could honor her, reverence her, pity her. She could understand the feeling of the man, too, she could think much more clearly than he. He was distracted by two passions, for his pride and his honor and for her; she had as yet but one, for him. And as there was less turmoil and confusion in her mind, she was the more capable of looking the facts in the face and making the right deduction from them. She could understand how in the first frightful rush of his grief and remorse and love the very fact that Newbold had been compelled to kill his wife, of whom she guessed he was beginning to grow a little weary, under such circumstances had added immensely to his remorse and quickened his determination to expiate his guilt and cherish her memory. She could understand why he would do just as he had done, go into the wilderness to be alone in horror of himself and in horror of his fellow men, to think only, mistakenly, of her.