der that Peter might not want to marry
Charlotte, that he might not be happy in doing so. She did not pause,
yet, to question--she did not dare to question, indeed--whether Peter
turned her own love. She was intent upon but one end: to protect
herself from what she felt for him, from what she would continue to
feel for him as long as he was free.

With this haste and need and fear upon her, she wrote to him, asking
him to come to her the next afternoon. It would be their first meeting
since Ted's ban upon their friendship, and she realized, with fresh
humiliation, that in spite of everything, she was glad of this chance
to be with Peter. She realized that she could scarcely wait until the
morrow should bring him to her. Because she was thus glad, she almost
decided not to send her note after all, and then--lest she would
not!--she hurried out and mailed it herself.

Somehow she got through dinner and the evening. She heard Eric's
lessons and tucked him away for the night with a bedtime story and the
kisses that, when no one was looking on, he was eager enough to
receive. She listened to Ted's anecdotes of the day and responded with
a mechanical vivacity. Then, at last, she was hidden by the night,
freed by the night--though she lay by Ted's side.

She had no right to suffer, but she did suffer now. As Peter had done
months before, she suffered through the darkness. But with her there
was no yielding to dear visions of a forbidden love, as there had been
with him; there was no picturing of life as it might have been with
him; no thrilling to the imaginary caresses and delights of a passion
which, in her married self, was wholly unworthy. Rather was the night
a long battle with the love that it so shamed her to find within
herself. Thus, in this distress of her soul, she was at least spared
the physical torture which Peter had endured. Not for an instant was
her love for Peter translated, in her mind, into physical terms; she
neither imagined nor desired its touch; in her guilt there was a
strange innocence--an innocence characteristic of her. She would go
through life unaware of the grosser aspects of things; under any
circumstances, however equivocal, she would be curiously pure. In one
thing only did she fall now to the level of less idealistic beings; in
spite of her struggle to the contrary, she wondered, at last, if Peter
loved her. She dared and stooped, in the privacy of the night, to
wonder tha