Calmness was unattainable.  The surprise absorbed her.  She could not go back to count the innumerable, imperceptible steps of her undoing.  Her old power of reflecting, analyzing, even thinking at all, seemed to have vanished in a pulse-stirring sense of one new emotion.  She only felt all her instinctive outward action that was a physical relief, all her involuntary inner strife that was maddening, yet unutterably sweet; and they seemed to be just one bewildering effect of surprise.

In a nature like hers, where strength of feeling had long been inhibited as a matter of training, such a transforming surprise as sudden consciousness of passionate love required time for its awakening, time for its sway.

By and by that last enlightening moment came, and Madeline Hammond faced not only the love in her heart, but the thought of the man she loved.

Suddenly, as she raged, something in her—­this dauntless new personality—­took arms against indictment of Gene Stewart.  Her mind whirled about him and his life.  She saw him drunk, brutal; she saw him abandoned, lost.  Then out of the picture she had of him thus slowly grew one of a different man—­weak, sick, changed by shock, growing strong, strangely, spiritually altered, silent, lonely like an eagle, secretive, tireless, faithful, soft as a woman, hard as iron to endure, and at the last noble.

She softened.  In a flash her complex mood changed to one wherein she thought of the truth, the beauty, the wonder of Stewart’s uplifting.  Humbly she trusted that she had helped him to climb.  That influence had been the best she had ever exerted.  It had wrought magic in her own character.  By it she had reached some higher, nobler plane of trust in man.  She had received infinitely more than she had given.

Her swiftly flying memory seemed to assort a vast mine of treasures of the past.  Of that letter Stewart had written to her brother she saw vivid words.  But ah! she had known, and if it had not made any difference then, now it made all in the world.  She recalled how her loosened hair had blown across his lips that night he had ridden down from the mountains carrying her in his arms.  She recalled the strange joy of pride in Stewart’s eyes when he had suddenly come upon her dressed to receive her Eastern guests in the white gown with the red roses at her breast.

Swiftly as they had come these dreamful memories departed.  There was to be no rest for her mind.  All she had thought and felt seemed only to presage a tumult.

Heedless, desperate, she cast off the last remnant of self-control, turned from the old proud, pale, cold, self-contained ghost of herself to face this strange, strong, passionate woman.  Then, with hands pressed to her beating heart, with eyes shut, she listened to the ringing trip-hammer voice of circumstance, of truth, of fatality.  The whole story was revealed, simple enough in the sum of its complicated details, strange and beautiful in part, remorseless in its proof of great love on Stewart’s side, in dreaming blindness on her own, and, from the first fatal moment to the last, prophetic of tragedy.