because I didn't tell him.
There was a reason why I didn't tell. It seemed then that I could not.
But oh, do you, who know so much, think he understands now, and does he
still care, or is he too far away? Could he understand my having done a
thing since he went, a thing that looks like disloyalty--treason--to
his memory, though indeed it was not that. It was done to save a life.
You will say, 'This is a mad woman who asks me such questions.' But I
almost wish I were mad. If I were, I mightn't realize how I suffer.
Yours--Barbara Denin."

He was stunned by the letter, and its revelation. She had _loved him_.

CHAPTER IX

The thought filled the man's soul and surrounded it as water fills and
surrounds a ring fallen into the sea. Barbara had loved him. There was
nothing in the world outside that thought.

At first, it caught him up to heaven, and then just as he saw the
light, it flung him down to hell.

Fool that he had been, never to see the truth under her reserve, while
seeing would have meant standing by her, keeping her forever! But he
had let her go, and it was too late now, even for explanations. He had
shut an iron door between them; and standing with her on the other side
of that door was a man who called her his wife. There was the
situation; and he, by his silence, had created it. He was condemned to
perpetual silence; for it was the wildest, most hopeless mockery of all
which brought to John Sanbourne a knowledge of Barbara's love for John
Denin.

Fate had been laughing at him while he wrote his book with a message of
peace for her, laughing wicked and cruel laughter, because through the
message he was to come into touch with Barbara and learn the tragic
failure of his sacrifice. That seemed to Denin a vile trick for life to
play upon a man, and whipped by the seven devils of thwarted love which
had entered into him he cursed it; cursed life and fate, himself and
Trevor d'Arcy, and was ready to deny Justice, even Justice blindfolded.

His heaven lasted for a moment at best. For many hours Cain and Abel in
him fought each other in hell. But he had been down in depths well nigh
as black, and had struggled out to the light. Remembering this, he
struggled out once more, at last, and perceived that, somehow, to his
own wondering surprise, he had stumbled up to a higher level and a
stronger footing than before. Within distant sight he visioned those
serene mountain tops where light is, the light that