her hands and burst into tears.

"O Philip, Philip, Philip," she sobbed aloud, "it was not right of you
to marry me; it was wicked of you to leave me!" Then in her mind she
carried on the impeachment and reproach. If he had married her openly
and left her at once, it would have been hard to bear, but in the
circumstances it might have been right. If he had married her secretly
and left her at the altar, so keeping the vow he had made her when she
promised to become his wife, that might have been pardonable. But to
marry her as he did, and then, breaking his solemn pledge, leave her--it
was not right in her eyes; and if not right in the eyes of her who loved
him, in whose would it be right?

To these definitions she had come at last.

It is an eventful moment, a crucial ordeal for a woman, when she forces
herself to see the naked truth concerning the man she has loved, yet the
man who has wronged her. She is born anew in that moment: it may be to
love on, to blind herself, and condone and defend, so lowering her own
moral tone; or to congeal in heart, become keener in intellect, scornful
and bitter with her own sex and merciless towards the other, indifferent
to blame and careless of praise, intolerant, judging all the world by her
own experience, incredulous of any true thing. Or again she may become
stronger, sadder, wiser; condoning nothing, minimising nothing, deceiving
herself in nothing, and still never forgiving at least one thing--the
destruction of an innocent faith and a noble credulity; seeing clearly
the whole wrong; with a strong intelligence measuring perfectly the
iniquity; but out of a largeness of nature and by virtue of a high sense
of duty, devoting her days to the salvation of a man's honour, to the
betterment of one weak or wicked nature.