He felt, as the time went by, that she had not written of her own
impulse, but at her daughter's urgence, and that it was this poor
creature whose trust he had paltered with. He believed that Durgin
would not fail to make her unhappy, yet he had not done what he might
to deliver her out of his hand. He had satisfied a wretched
pseudo-magnanimity toward a faithless scoundrel, as he thought Durgin,
at the cost of a woman whose anxious hope of his aid had probably forced
her mother's hand.

At first he thought his action irrevocable, and he bitterly upbraided
himself for not taking council with Cynthia upon Mrs. Vostrand's letter.
He had thought of doing that, and then he had dismissed the thought as
involving pain that he had no right to inflict; but now he perceived
that the pain was such as she must suffer in the event, and that he had
stupidly refused himself the only means of finding out the right thing
to do. Her true heart and her clear mind would have been infallible in
the affair, and he had trusted to his own muddled impulse.

He began to write other letters: to Durgin, to Mrs. Vostrand, to
Genevieve; but none of them satisfied him, and he let the days go by
without doing anything to retrieve his error or fulfil his duty. At last
he did what he ought to have done at first: he enclosed Mrs. Vostrand's
letter to Cynthia, and asked her what she thought he ought to have done.
While he was waiting Cynthia's answer to his letter, a cable message
reached him from Florence:

"Kind letter received. Married to-day. Written.

"Vostrand."

The next mail brought Cynthia's reply, which was very brief:

"I am sorry you had to write at all; nothing could have prevented
it. Perhaps if he cares for her he will be good to her."

Since the matter was now irremediable, Westover crept less miserably
through the days than he could have believed he should, until the letter
which Mrs. Vostrand's cable promised came to hand.

"Dear friend," she wrote, "your generous and satisfactory answer
came yesterday. It was so delicate and high,-minded, and so like
you, to write to Mr. Durgin, and leave the whole affair to him; and
he did not lose a moment in showing us your beautiful letter. He
said you were a man after his own heart, and I wish you could have
heard how he praised you. It made Genevieve quite jealous, or would
have, if it had been any one else. But she is so happy in