ble strain of the long
and painful recital you have felt it necessary to make, in order that I
might fully understand your position in all its bearings. The real
question is this: Are you going to forgive Jim Airth?"

"I must never forgive him," said Lady Ingleby, with finality, "because,
if I forgave him, I could not let him go."

"Why let him go, when his going leaves your whole life desolate?"

"Because," said Myra, "I feel I could not trust him; and I dare not marry
a man whom I love as I love Jim Airth, unless I can trust him as
implicitly as I trust my God. If I loved him less, I would take the risk.
But I feel, for him, something which I can neither understand nor define;
only I know that in time it would make him so completely master of me
that, unless I could trust him absolutely--I should be afraid."

"Is a man never to be trusted again," asked Jane, "because, under sudden
fierce temptation, he has failed you once?"

"It is not the failing once," said Myra. "It is the light thrown upon the
whole quality of his love--of that _kind_ of love. The passion of it
makes it selfish--selfish to the degree of being utterly regardless of
right and wrong, and careless of the welfare of its unfortunate object.
My fair name would have been smirched; my honour dragged in the mire; my
present, blighted; my future, ruined; but what did _he_ care? It was all
swept aside in the one sentence: 'You are mine, not his. You must come
away with me.' I cannot trust myself to a love which has no standard of
right and wrong. We look at it from different points of view. _You_ see
only the man and his temptation. _I_ knew the priceless treasure of the
love; therefore the sin against that love seems to me unforgivable."

Mrs. Dalmain looked earnestly at her friend. Her steadfast eyes were
deeply troubled.

"Myra," she said, "you are absolutely right in your definitions, and
correct in your conclusions. But your mistake is this. You make no
allowance for the sudden, desperate, overwhelming nature of the
temptation before which Jim Airth fell. Remember all that led up to it.
Think of it, Myra! He stood so alone in the world; no mother, no wife, no
woman's tenderness. And those ten hard years of worse than loneliness,
when he fought the horrors of disillusion, the shame of betrayal, the
bitterness of desertion; the humiliation of the stain upon his noble
name. Against all this, during ten long years, he struggled; fought a
manful fight,