you want to know
better?"

The colour rose to her forehead. How could she tell him what she
scarcely dared own to herself? There was nothing she did not want to
know, no fold or cranny of his secret that her awakened imagination did
not strain to penetrate; but she could not expose Sophy Viner to
the base fingerings of a retrospective jealousy, nor Darrow to the
temptation of belittling her in the effort to better his own case. The
girl had been magnificent, and the only worthy return that Anna could
make was to take Darrow from her without a question if she took him at
all...

She lifted her eyes to his face. "I think I only wanted to speak her
name. It's not right that we should seem so afraid of it. If I were
really afraid of it I should have to give you up," she said.

He bent over her and caught her to him. "Ah, you can't give me up now!"
he exclaimed.

She suffered him to hold her fast without speaking; but the old dread
was between them again, and it was on her lips to cry out: "How can I
help it, when I AM so afraid?"

XXXV

The next morning the dread was still there, and she understood that she
must snatch herself out of the torpor of the will into which she had
been gradually sinking, and tell Darrow that she could not be his wife.

The knowledge came to her in the watches of a sleepless night, when,
through the tears of disenchanted passion, she stared back upon her
past. There it lay before her, her sole romance, in all its paltry
poverty, the cheapest of cheap adventures, the most pitiful of
sentimental blunders. She looked about her room, the room where, for so
many years, if her heart had been quiescent her thoughts had been
alive, and pictured herself henceforth cowering before a throng of mean
suspicions, of unavowed compromises and concessions. In that moment of
self-searching she saw that Sophy Viner had chosen the better part, and
that certain renunciations might enrich where possession would have left
a desert.

Passionate reactions of instinct fought against these efforts of her
will. Why should past or future coerce her, when the present was so
securely hers? Why insanely surrender what the other would after all
never have? Her sense of irony whispered that if she sent away Darrow
it would not be to Sophy Viner, but to the first woman who crossed his
path--as, in a similar hour, Sophy Viner herself had crossed it...But
the mere fact that she could think such things of him sent h