"It's before another woman he's abasing himself," she thought, "not before me. He isn't even thinking of me." When she spoke her tone was cold and sneering: "I hope she will forgive you. She certainly would if she could know what a paladin you are." He winced, but did not answer. At the road up the bluffs she paused and there was an embarrassed silence. Then he poured out abrupt sentences: "It was doubly base. I betrayed your friendly trust, I was false to her. Don't misunderstand--she's nothing to me. She's nothing to me, yet everything. I began really to live when I began to love her. And--every one must have a--a pole-star. And she's mine--the star I sail by, and always must. And--" He halted altogether, then blundered on: "I shall not forgive myself. But you--be merciful--forgive me--forget it!" "I shall do neither," she replied curtly, jealousy and vanity stamping down the generous impulse that rose in response to his appeal. And she went up her road. A few yards and she paused, hoping to hear him coming after her. A few yards more and she sat down on a big boulder by the wayside. Until now all the wishes of her life had been more or less material, had been wishes which her wealth or the position her wealth gave had enabled her instantly to gratify. She buried her face in her arms and sobbed and rocked herself to and fro, in a cyclone of anger, and jealousy, and shame, and love, and despair. "I hate him!" she exclaimed between clenched teeth. "I hate him, but--if he came and wanted me, oh, how I would LOVE him!" Meanwhile Pauline was at her father's. "He isn't down yet," said her mother. "You know, he doesn't finish dressing nowadays until he has read the papers and his mail. Then he walks in the garden." "I'll go there," said Pauline. "Won't you bring him when he's ready?" She never entered the garden that the ghosts of her childhood--how far, far it seemed!--did not join her, brushing against her, or rustling in tree and bush and leafy trellis. She paused at the end of the long arbor and sat on the rustic bench there. A few feet away was the bed of lilies-of-the-valley. Every spring of her childhood she used to run from the house on the first warm morning and hurry to it; and if her glance raised her hopes she would kneel upon the young grass and lower her head until her long golden hair touched the black ground; and the soil that had been hard and cold all winter would be cracked open this way and that; and from the cracks would issue an odor--the odor of life. And as she would peer into each crack in turn she would see, down, away down, the pale tip of what she knew to be an up-shooting slender shaft. And her heart would thrill with joy, for she knew that the shafts would presently rise green above the black earth, would unfold, would blossom, would bloom, would fling from tremulous bells a perfumed proclamation of the arrival of spring.