he understood her now, and he was going to her to help her if he could,
going to tell her that he, too, was changed--as she was changed.

His hands clenched suddenly. God, the misery, the hopelessness, the
wreck and ruin that lay at his door! And amends--what amends could he
make--it was too late for that! How clearly he saw now--when it was too
late! Her life was a broken thing, robbed, stripped and despoiled for
all the years to come. Their love had not been love--she had given it
its name--"passion, vice, lust, sin, degradation and misery and shame."
And then love had come to her, into her life, love as God had meant love
to be, and she had learned what love was she had said--only that she
might never know its fulness, only that it might bring her added
bitterness and added sorrow! Thornton had asked her to marry him that
night--and she had refused him--because the past, it must have been as a
shuddering, hideous phantom that the past had risen before her, had left
her no other thing to do but turn away. It seemed he could see her--see
her bury her face in her hands and--

He stopped short in his walk. Was he changed so much as this! Did he
care so much that it was her happiness--even with another--that counted
most! Yes; it was true--he was changed indeed. And the change had
brought him too, it seemed, to learn what love was--too late.

He went forward again--a little more slowly; now; a sadness upon him,
but, through the sadness, an uplift from that new sense of freedom that
was as a balm, soothing him in the most curious way. His had been a rude
awakening--mind and body and soul had been torn asunder; but he knew
now, as he recalled the hours just past when he had looked on fear, when
the gamut of human passion had raged over him, when he had stood
staggered and appalled before, yes, before his God, that he had come