She shook her head impatiently when she faced that squarely. Why tread
the same bitter road again? But she put that self-interested phase of it
aside and asked herself candidly if she _could_ go back and take up the
old threads where they had been broken off and make life run smoothly
along the old, quiet channels? She was as sure as she was sure of the
breath she drew that Fyfe wanted her, that he longed for and would
welcome her. But she was equally sure that the old illusions would never
serve. She couldn't even make him happy, much less herself.
Monohan--well, Monohan was a dead issue. He had come to the Charteris to
see her, all smiles and eagerness. She had been able to look at him and
through him--and cut him dead--and do it without a single flutter of her
heart.

That brief and illuminating episode in Wain's had merely confirmed an
impression that had slowly grown upon her, and her outburst of feeling
that night had only been the overflowing of shamed anger at herself for
letting his magnetic personality make so deep an impression on her that
she could admit to him that she cared. She felt that she had belittled
herself by that. But he was no longer a problem. She wondered now how he
ever could have been. She recalled that once Jack Fyfe had soberly told
her she would never sense life's real values while she nursed so many
illusions. Monohan had been one of them.

"But it wouldn't work," she whispered to herself. "I couldn't do it.
He'd know I only did it because I was sorry, because I thought I should,
because the old ties, and they seem so many and so strong in spite of
everything, were harder to break than the new road is to follow alone.
He'd resent anything like pity for his loneliness. And if Monohan has
made any real trouble, it began over me, or at least it focussed on me.
And he might resent that. He's ten times a better man than I am a woman.
He thinks about the other fellow's side of things. I'm just what he said
about Charlie, self-centered, a profound egotist. If I really and truly
loved Jack Fyfe, I'd be a jealous little fury if he so much as looked at
another woman. But I don't, and I don't see why I don't. I want to be
loved; I want to love. I've always wanted that so much that I'll never
dare trust my instincts about it again. I wonder why people like me
exist to go blundering about in the world, playing havoc with themselves
and everybody else?"

Before she reached home, that self-sacrifi