nce, but absence has not separated me from him. I have tried
silence, but through the silence I have never ceased speaking to
him. Nothing has really ever separated us; nothing ever can. It
is more than will or purpose, it is my life. It is more than life
to me, it is love."

She spoke very quietly, and at first she seemed unable to progress
very far from the beginning. After every start, she soon came back
to that one beginning.

"It is of no use to weigh the right and the wrong of it: I tried
that at first, and I suppose that is why I made sad mistakes. You
must not think that I am acting now from a sense of duty to him or
to myself. Duty does not enter into my feeling: it is love; all
that I am forbids me to do anything else."

But after a while she went back and bared before him in a way the
history of her heart. "The morning after he told me, I went to
church. I remember the lessons of the day and the hymns, and how I
left the church before the sermon, because everything seemed to be
on his side, and no one was on mine. He had done wrong and was
guilty; and I had been wrong and was innocent; and the church
comforted him and overlooked me; and I was angry and walked out of
it.

"And do you remember the day I came to see you and you proposed
everything to me, and I rejected everything? You told me to go
away for a while, to throw myself into the pleasures of other
people; you reminded me of prayer and of the duty of forgiveness;
you told me to try to put myself in his place, and reminded me of
self-sacrifice, and then said at last that I must leave it to time,
which sooner or later settles everything. I rejected everything
that you suggested. But I have accepted everything since, and have
learned a lesson and a service from each: the meaning of prayer and
of forgiveness and of self-sacrifice; and what the lapse of time
can do to bring us to ourselves and show us what we wish. I say, I
have lived through all these, and I have gotten something out of
them all; but however much they may mean, they never constitute
love; and it is my love that brings me back to him now."

Later on she recurred to the idea of self-sacrifice: much other
deepest feeling seemed to gather about that.

"I am afraid that you do not realize what it means to a woman when
a principle like this is involved. Can any man ever know? Does he
dream what it means to us women to sacrifice ourselves as they
often require us to do?