himself powerless to resist the love that was regaining strength
enough to batter down the wall of prejudice her marriage had created in
his mind, there would still stand between them his conviction that it
would be an act of vileness to claim or even covet the wife of the man
whose life he had taken, not in anger or reprisal but in honest devotion.

Anne was not callous or unfeeling in her readiness to disregard what he
might be expected to call the ethics of the case. She very sensibly looked
at the question as one in which the conscience had no part, for the simple
reason that there was no guilty motive to harass it. If his conscience was
clear,--and it most certainly was,--there could be no sound reason for him
to deny himself the right to reclaim that which belonged to him by all the
laws of nature. On her part there was not the slightest feeling of
revulsion. She did not look upon his act as a barrier. Her own act in
betraying him was far more of a barrier than this simple thing that he had
done. She had believed it to be insurmountable. She had long ago accepted
as final the belief that he despised her and would go on doing so to the
end. And now, in the last hour, there had been a revelation. He still
loved her. His scorn, his contempt, his disgust were not equal to the task
of subduing the emotion that lived in spite of all of them. But this other
thing! This thing that he would call _decency_!

All through the afternoon his savage, discordant cry: "Don't do that!"
rang in her ears. She thrilled and crumpled in turn. The blood ran hot
once more in her veins. As she looked back over the past year it seemed to
her that her blood had been cold and sluggish. But now it was warm again
and tingling. Even the desolating thought that her discovery would yield
no profit failed to check the riotous, grateful warmth that raced through
her body from crown to toe. Despair had its innings, but there was always
compensation in the return of a joy that would not acknowledge itself
beaten. Joy enough to feel that he could not help loving her! Joy to feel
that he was hungry too! No matter what happened now she would know that
she had not lost all of him.

After a while she found herself actually enjoying the prospect of certain
failure on Braden's part in the case of Marraville. Reviled and excoriated
beyond endurance, he would take refuge in the haven that she alone could
open to him. He would come to her and she would go with