He got up, thrust his hands into his pockets, and, walking over to the window, stood there for a moment. Then he turned suddenly, and came and stood in front of Martha, looking her directly in the eyes. She saw by that look that he was calm and steady, and so she ventured to question him a little further. “Do you know whom she lives with?” she asked. “With an aunt, whose life, as she told me, is utterly out of the world that we knew together. She said that, on this account, there was good reason to hope that we would never meet again.” Martha, who felt that this subject might not be spoken of between them again, continued to question him as he stood and looked down at her with a perfect consciousness of self-possession. “Was she so beautiful?” she asked. “Yes,” he said. “And are you still unchanged in giving her the supreme place that you did give her from the moment you first saw her?” “Yes,” he said again. “Oh, Harold,” exclaimed the girl, “I sometimes think it might have turned out differently if the marriage had not been so rash and sudden.” He took a seat near her, and continued to look at her as he said: “It could have made no difference to me. You don’t fully understand it, Martha. It is impossible that you should. I knew, the day I met her, that I had been set apart and saved for her. I know it now. It was the kind of gravitation that comes once in a life.” “Then you do not regret it?” “For myself, not in the least. She was my wife for a month. What I have gone through since is a small price to pay for that. But when I think of what it has cost her--that most delicate of women--to face the odium of it--that superb woman’s life shadowed by the vulgarity of a suddenly ruptured marriage; and--deeper than that!--to have her best life maimed forever--God! I curse the day that I was born!” “And what has she brought on you, I’d like to know?” cried Martha. “It was she who cast you off--not you her. Ah, Harold, if she had been the woman she should have been, she never could have done it!” He looked at her with some impatience in his glance. “Whether she was the woman she should have been or not is a thing that neither concerns nor interests me. She was the woman I loved. The whole thing is in that.” “And the woman you still love? Is that true, Harold?”