terview that the pinch comes. She answered him only with her deeply
attentive look, and he went on:

"I did not come to those convictions; they came to me; or rather, they
were in me, and bore down all the other feelings. All the noisy
passions dropped away before them, and left just those clear voices in
my soul. They made all my love and loyalty work together, instead of
tearing me in opposite directions. For, see, Winifred, hasn't it been
our moral faith for years that to do spiritual harm to another is the
greatest evil that can befall one, and to do him spiritual benefit,
the greatest good? All these years since we were in school together,
I have been proud to think that it could be only a good to you to have
me think of you as I have thought, because it was only a good to me.
And I will not be so disloyal now as to let my life be spoiled because
of you."

Winifred looked at him aghast. "All these years!" It was a revelation
intolerable at first shock to a woman that was no coquette.

"I think it was all the time dimly in my mind what _your_ last year
had been; at last I went out of my life and into yours. I want you to
understand that I do not think of it with bitterness, because I
entered so little into it; I realize, Winifred"--his voice broke from
its steadiness--"that you have been good, _good_ in it all. If you had
not been--if you had trifled with me--I think I should be at the
bottom of the river to-day. But since no one has wronged me," he went
on more quietly, "since nothing monstrous or unnatural has befallen
me, everything I believed in has the same claim on me as ever.

"And I want you to know that you need not _mind_ my love, Winifred."
She dropped her eyes and stood mute. "It is something you may be
willing and glad to have without troubling yourself because you cannot
return it. For any pain that has happened, do not trouble yourself
about that either--if I don't mind it, you needn't," he said, smiling
a little, with a certain manly sweetness quite new to him. "I find one
gains something in having no longer to struggle with pain and try to
keep her at arm's length."

She looked up then, and cried out passionately. "O Will, Will, if only
there was anything in all this world I could do to make it up to you!"

"There is nothing to make up," he said. "I would rather have pain from
you than pleasure from any one else. But there _is_ something that you
can do; this: not to feel my love a burden laid