if he would promise to
throw the vile woman over, she would forgive him. She did not, of
course, reflect that forgiveness is not a thing that can be promised; it
cannot be manufactured. It comes in exact proportion as we love the
sinner more and self less.

And forgiveness is not forgetfulness! It is more love.

Eleanor did not know this. So, except for those occasional cooling and
divine moments of blaming herself, she scorched and shriveled in the
flames of self-love. And as usual, she was speechless. There were many
of these silent hours (which were such a matter of course to Maurice
that he never noticed them!) before she gathered herself together, and
decided that she would not leave him. She would fight! How? "Oh, I
_can't_ think!" she moaned. So those first days passed--days of impotent
determinations, which whirled and alternated, and contradicted each
other.

Once Maurice, glancing at her over his newspaper at breakfast,
thought to himself, "She hasn't said a word since she got up! Poor
Eleanor!..." Then he remembered how he had once supposed these silences
of hers were full of things too lovely and profound for words! He
frowned, and read the sporting page, and forgot her silences, and her,
too. But he did not forget Jacky. "I'll buy the kid a ball," he was
thinking....

So the days passed, and each day Eleanor dredged her silences, to find
words: "What shall I say to him?" for of course she must say
_something_! She must "have it out with him," as the phrase is.
Sometimes she would decide to burst into a statement of the fact:
"Somebody called 'L. D.' has a claim upon you, because she sends for you
when 'Jacky' is sick. I am certain that 'Jacky' is your child! I am
certain that 'L.D.' is Mrs. Dale. I am certain that you don't love
me...." And he would say--Then her heart would stand still: What
_would_ he say? He would say, "I stopped loving you _because you are
old_." And to that would come her own terrible assent: "I had no right
to marry him--he was only nineteen. I had no right..." (Thus did that
new-born sense of her own complicity in Maurice's sin raise its feeble
voice!) And little by little the Voice became stronger: "I didn't make
him happy _not_ because I was old, but because I was selfish...." So, in
alternating gusts of anger and fear, and outraged pride,--and
self-forgetting horror for Maurice,--her soul began to awake. Again and
again she counted the reasons why he had not been happy, begin