she had appeared
to him only a few hours since when, at her bidding, trusting her,
believing in her, loving her, he had turned his back on his
duty--betrayed.

Resentment at the treachery warred with his love and tinged his sorrow
with bitterness. How she had played with him, tricking him, fooling him,
outwitting him--and yet loving him.

The memory of the last fond look of lingering tenderness which had been
in her eyes ere he told her Dudgeon was dead came to him. Why had he
told her that? Why had he not let her die as she was then, with the
gentle side of her nature dominating her, filled with the one soft
impulse she perhaps had ever known?

The words had slipped from his tongue almost before he knew, and on the
instant there had come back to her the overshadowing influence which had
warped her life for evil even before she was born.

By his hand she had died; by his words her last moments had been filled
with the blackness of insensate hate.

Before the mute condemnation of that self-accusing thought the
bitterness which had been in his mind against her dissipated. Whatever
ills she had done to him, he had done greater to her. Whatever ills she
had done to humanity were the outcome not of her own nature, but of the
circumstances and conditions which had governed her from the moment she
was born. All that she had said during the last evening he spent at her
house recurred to him and a new significance dawned into the words.

She had spoken of herself, pleaded for herself, striven to rouse his
sympathy and compassion, so that, within the sombre barrenness of her
ill-starred life, one spot there might be where the loving kindness of
human charity had fallen and made it bright. He remembered how he had
answered her--coldly, sternly, crushing down her awakening soul with the
same callous indifference which had always met her. With the pitiless
weight of a loveless life, what wonder she was warped, distorted,
marred? More sinned against than sinning, he had no right nor will to
blame her--only the love she had inspired in him remained, to fill his
heart with sadness and drag it down with the hopeless desolation of vain
regrets.

For she had gone from him even as she revealed the love she bore him,
gone into the darkness by his own act, gone--his throat grew hard until
he choked as the thought came to him--gone from a greater degradation
he, by the merciless irony of fate, would have had to fasten upon her.

Bet