In
the end, he said that she had just promised
to be his wife. I answered nothing.
Other men, I knew, had said that
with the same right, perhaps, and had
gone from her to go back no more.
And I was one of them. Grayson had
met her at White Sulphur five years
before, and had loved her ever since.
She had known it from the first, he
said, and I guessed then what was going
to happen to him. I marvelled, listening
to the man, for it was the star of
constancy in her white soul that was
most lustrous to him--and while I
wondered the marvel became a commonplace.
Did not every lover think his
loved one exempt from the frailty that
names other women? There is no ideal
of faith or of purity that does not live
in countless women to-day. I believe
that; but could I not recall one friend
who walked with Divinity through pine
woods for one immortal spring, and who,
being sick to death, was quite finished
--learning her at last? Did I not know
lovers who believed sacred to themselves,
in the name of love, lips that
had been given to many another without
it? And now did I not know--but
I knew too much, and to Grayson I said
nothing.
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