"You are my one man. I love you so much that I am going to give my whole life into your hands, as fully and as freely as I shall some day give my spirit into the hands of God. But, Pierre, there are those who have been very, very kind to me, those to whom I owe--well, explanations. When I have made those explanations and--and settled my accounts,--then all the rest of my life is yours." "You are very, very sure, Anne?" His voice was wistful. "My love for you," she said proudly, "is the one great reality. I am surer of that than I have ever been of anything in this world." And she stood there looking at him with her heart in her eyes. Of a sudden, with a little cry, she pulled his head down to her, kissed him upon the mouth, pushed him from her, and fled. When she reached her room again, she couldn't sleep, but knelt by her window and watched the skies pale and then flush like a young girl's face, and the morning-star blaze and pale, and the sun come up over a bright and beautiful world in which she herself was, she felt, new-born. Far in the background of things, unreal as a dream, hovered the unlovely figure of Nancy Simms, and nearer, but still almost as unreal, the bright, cold figure of Anne Champneys, that Anne Champneys who had wished to marry Berkeley Hayden to gratify pride and ambition. The woman kneeling by the window, watching the glory of the morning, looked back upon those two as a winged butterfly might remember its caterpillar crawlings. All that glittering life Anne Champneys had planned for herself? Swept away as if it had been a bit of tinsel! Money? Position? She laughed low to herself. She didn't care whether her man had possessions or lacked them. All she asked was that he should be himself--and hers. All that Milly had been to Chadwick Champneys--the passionate lover, the perfect comrade, the friend nothing daunted, no wind of fortune could change--Anne could be, would be to Pierre. There was but one shadow upon her new happiness: she hated to disappoint Marcia. Marcia had set her heart upon the Hayden marriage. It was toward that consummation, so devoutly to be hoped, that Marcia had planned. And just when that plan was nearing perfection Anne was going to have to frustrate it. She hated to hurt Hayden himself, and the thought of his angry disappointment was painful to her. She _liked_ Hayden. She would always like him. But she couldn't marry him. To marry Hayden, loving Pierre, would have been to work them both an irremediable injury. A sort of horror of what she had been about to do came upon her. The bare thought of it made her recoil.