He was conscious of a curious feeling of indignation in regard to the man who had been cruel enough to take from that woman her promise to love him, and him only, and then to leave her to waste her life away in waiting for him. He fancied he could picture her life during the years that Claude Westwood had been absent, and he felt that he had a right to be indignant with a man who had been selfish enough to bind a woman to himself with such a bond. Of course most women would, he knew, not consider such a bond binding upon them after a year or two: they would have been faithful to the man for a year--perhaps some of the most devoted might have been faithful for as long as eighteen months after his departure from England, and the extremely conscientious ones for six months after he had been swallowed up in the blackness of that black continent. They would not have been content to live the life that had been Agnes Mowbray's--the life of waiting and hoping with those alternate intervals of despair. The man had behaved cruelly toward her, for he should have known that she was not as other women. It was the feeling that the man was not worthy of her that caused Sir Percival Hope his only misgiving. He wondered if he himself had chanced to meet Agnes before she had known Claude Westwood, what would her life have been--what would his life have been? He stood in the road and tried to form a picture of their life--of their lives joined together so as to make one life. He hurried on. The picture was too bright to be looked upon. He found it easier to think of the picture which had been before his eyes when he had looked back hearing her voice calling him--the picture of a beautiful pale woman, with one hand leaning on the trellis-work of the porch, while the roses drooped down to her hair. “The cruelty of it--the cruelty of it!” he groaned, as he hurried on to perform his mission. And these were the very words that Agnes Mowbray was moaning at the same instant, as she fell on her knees beside the sofa in her dressing-room. This was all the prayer that her lips could frame at that moment. “The cruelty of it! The cruelty of it!” That was the result of all her thoughts of the past years that she had spent in waiting.