to her had been a jeering statement that she had no
ability, only a certain charm of sex. How, oh, how, had she ever
imagined that they two might possibly share a happy life together?

But after a season her wrath began to subside, and she began to see
that after all Bruce was no very different man from the Bruce she had
loved the last few weeks. He had been thoroughly consistent with
himself. She had known that he was cocksure and domineering. She had
foreseen that the chances were at least equal that he would take the
position he had. She had foreseen and feared this very issue. His
virtues were just as big as on yesterday, when she and he had thought
of marriage, and his faults were no greater. And she realized, after
the first passion of their battle had spent its force, that she still
loved him.

In the long hours of the night a pang of emptiness, of vast,
irretrievable loss, possessed her. She and Love had touched each other
for a space--then had flung violently apart, and were speeding each in
their eternally separate direction. Life for her might be rich and
full of honour and achievement, but as she looked forward into the
long procession of years, she saw that life was going to have its
dreariness, its vacancies, its dull, unending aches. It was going to
be such a very, very different business from that life of work and
love and home and mutual aid she had daringly dreamed of during the
two weeks she and Bruce had been lovers.

But she did not regret her decision. She did not falter. Her
resentment of Bruce's attitude stiffened the backbone of her purpose.
She was going straight ahead, bear the bitterness, and live the life
she had planned as best she could.

But there quickly came other matters to share her mind with a lost
love and a broken dream. First was the uproar created by Bruce's
defiant announcement in the _Express_ of Blind Charlie's threatened
treachery. That sensation reigned for a day or two, then was almost
forgotten in a greater. This second sensation made its initial
appearance quite unobtrusively; it had a bare dozen lines down in a
corner of the same issue of the _Express_ that had contained Bruce's
defiance and Doctor Sherman's departure. The substance of the item was
that two cases of illness had been reported from the negro quarter in
River Court, and that the doctors said the symptoms were similar to
those of typhoid fever.

Those two cases of fever in that old frame tenement up a