And yet--she was leaving Sheila, leaving her to an essentially alien companion. What wonder that, in her passionate solicitude, she had reached out to the one person whose understanding sympathy she could count upon? What wonder that, however unpractically, she had made an appeal to one whose heart she had divined better than she knew? What wonder, even, that he had made her a sort of promise? "There is nothing I would not do for you or Sheila!" he had said to her; and that was true. There was nothing he would not do for them--if he could. Only--Ted himself must keep what was his own! He had been man enough to win Sheila; now he must keep her! Ted had been man enough to win her; and he, Peter, had not been! That was what he realized now--with measureless self-scorn. _He_ had not even been man enough to know that he loved her; much less man enough to make her his. And now, because he could not make her his, his life was charred to ashes--but his soul was an anguished, unquenchable flame. He had long thought that he knew the worst of himself; his discreditable indolence; his reluctance for effort and conquest; his insufficient courage to follow his emotions into poverty; and that negligible fineness of his which had held him back from advantages that he could not repay with genuine emotion. He had known all that of himself, calling it his worst, and feeling a certain pride in it, too, as in a failure that was of more delicate fiber than the successes of others. But he had never really known the worst of himself until now. For the worst of him was that he had not recognized the true love of his life when it came to him. Those early fancies of his for girls whom he deemed too poor to marry--what had they been but fancies indeed? He had despised himself once or twice for not committing himself, but what was the offense of failing a mere fancy compared to the offense of not recognizing the one true love when it was in his life? He would have had courage enough to follow it to the world's end, in sharpest poverty and hardship, but he had so sheltered himself from any mischance in love that he had not known love when it came. Blind fool that he was, he had not known it when it came! Even now he could not tell just when it had come. Looking back along the years, it seemed to him to have been there always, for every memory of Sheila, since her little girlhood, took him by the throat.