yriads of
moments when he did not believe himself first in her heart as she had
always been first in his; and now, after he had waited patiently, and
after she, out of her own full heart, had confessed her woman's love,
after she had given him herself in abject, sweet surrender, and had
taken him for her own, the thought of her perfidy was torture to him.
Then came again like a soothing balm the young memory of their last
meeting. He recalled and weighed every word, act, and look. Surely, he
thought, no woman could feign the love she had shown for him. She had
not even tried to show her love. It had been irrepressible. Why should
she wish to feign a love she did not feel? There was nothing she could
gain by deceit. But upon the heels of this slight hope came that
incontestable fact,--Williams. Dic could see her sitting with the
stranger as she had sat with himself at the step-off. Williams had been
coming for four months. She might be in his arms at that moment--the
hour was still early--before the old familiar fireplace, while the
family were in the kitchen. He could not endure the picture he had
conjured, so he rose from his bed, dressed, stole softly from the house,
and walked through the winter storm down the river to Bays's. Feeling
like a thief, he crept to the window. The night being cold, the fire had
not been banked, but threw its glow out into the room; and Dic's heart
leaped for joy when he saw the room was empty. At that same moment Rita
was in her own room, not twenty feet away from him, sobbing on her
pillow and wishing she were dead.

Dic's discovery of the empty room had no real significance, but it
seemed a good omen, and he went home and slept.

Rita did not sleep. She knew the first step had been taken to separate
her from Dic. She feared the separation was really effected. She had
offended this manly, patient lover so frequently that surely, she
thought, he would not forgive her this last and greatest insult. She
upbraided herself for having, through stupidity and cowardice, allowed
him to leave her. He had belonged to her for years; and the sweet
thought that she belonged to him, and that it was her God-given
privilege to give herself to him and to no other, pressed upon her
heart, and she cried out in the darkness: "I will not give him up! I
will not! If he will forgive me, I will fall upon my knees and beg him
to try me once again."

Christmas was a long, wretched day for Dic. What it was to Ri