After a while she stopped thinking of David and the letter she had not been able to write; it seemed as if, when she tried to make it clear to herself why she did not write to him, something stopped in her mind--a cog did not catch; the thought eluded her. When this happened--as it had happened again and again in these last days; she would fall to thinking, with vague amazement, that this irremediable catastrophe was out of all proportion to its cause. It was monstrous that a crazy minute should ruin a whole life--two whole lives, hers and David's. It was as if a pebble should deflect a river from its course, and make it turn and overflow a landscape! It was incredible that so temporary a thing as an outbreak of temper should have eternal consequences. She gasped, with her face buried in her arms, at the realization--which comes to most of us poor human creatures sooner or later--that sins may be forgiven, but their results remain. As for sin--but surely that meaningless madness was not sin? "It was insanity," she said, shivering at the memory of that hour in the toll-house--that little mad hour, that brought eternity with it! She had had other crazy hours, with no such weight of consequence. Her mind went back over her engagement: her love, her happiness--and her tempers. Well, nothing had come of them. David always understood. And still further back: her careless, fiery girlhood--when the knowledge of her mother's recreancy, undermining her sense of responsibility by the condoning suggestion of heredity, had made her quick to excuse her lack of self-control. Her girlhood had been full of those outbreaks of passion, which she "couldn't help"; they were all meaningless, and all harmless, too; at any rate they were all without results of pain to her. Suddenly it seemed to her, as she looked across the roaring gulf that separated her from the past, that all her life had been just a sunny slope down to the edge of the gulf. All those "harmless" tempers which had had no results, had pushed her to this result!