he pulled his head down to her, kissed
him upon the mouth, pushed him from her, and fled.

When she reached her room again, she couldn't sleep, but knelt by
her window and watched the skies pale and then flush like a young
girl's face, and the morning-star blaze and pale, and the sun come
up over a bright and beautiful world in which she herself was, she
felt, new-born. Far in the background of things, unreal as a dream,
hovered the unlovely figure of Nancy Simms, and nearer, but still
almost as unreal, the bright, cold figure of Anne Champneys, that
Anne Champneys who had wished to marry Berkeley Hayden to gratify
pride and ambition. The woman kneeling by the window, watching the
glory of the morning, looked back upon those two as a winged
butterfly might remember its caterpillar crawlings.

All that glittering life Anne Champneys had planned for herself?
Swept away as if it had been a bit of tinsel! Money? Position? She
laughed low to herself. She didn't care whether her man had
possessions or lacked them. All she asked was that he should
be himself--and hers. All that Milly had been to Chadwick
Champneys--the passionate lover, the perfect comrade, the friend
nothing daunted, no wind of fortune could change--Anne could be,
would be to Pierre.

There was but one shadow upon her new happiness: she hated to
disappoint Marcia. Marcia had set her heart upon the Hayden
marriage. It was toward that consummation, so devoutly to be hoped,
that Marcia had planned. And just when that plan was nearing
perfection Anne was going to have to frustrate it. She hated to hurt
Hayden himself, and the thought of his angry disappointment was
painful to her. She _liked_ Hayden. She would always like him. But
she couldn't marry him. To marry Hayden, loving Pierre, would have
been to work them both an irremediable injury. A sort of horror of
what she had been about to do came upon her. The bare thought of it
made her recoil.

Her native shrewdness told her that Hayden's immense pride would
come to his aid. The fact that she had dared to desire somebody
else, to prefer another to his lordly self would be enough to prove
to Hayden that she wasn't worthy of his affections. He would feel
that he had been deceived in her. She couldn't help hoping that he
wouldn't altogether despise her. She hoped that Marcia wouldn't be
too angry to forgive her. And then her thoughts merged into a
prayer: Oh dear God, help her to make Pierre happy, to grow t