A white moth of the night wandered into Rowan’s face searching its features; then it flitted over to her and searched hers, its wings fanning and clinging to her lips; and then it passed on, pursuing amid mistakes and inconstancies its life-quest lasting through a few darknesses.

Fear suddenly reached down into her heart and drew up one question; and she asked that question in a voice low and cold and guarded: 

“Sometime, when you ask another woman to marry you, will you think it your duty to tell her?”

“I will never ask any other woman.”

“I did not inquire for your intention; I asked what you would believe to be your duty.”

“It will never become my duty.  But if it should, I would never marry without being true to the woman; and to be true is to tell the truth.”

“You mean that you would tell her?”

“I mean that I would tell her.”

After a little silence she stirred in her seat and spoke, all her anger gone: 

“I am going to ask you, if you ever do, not to tell her as you have told me—­after it is too late.  If you cannot find some way of letting her know the truth before she loves you, then do not tell her afterward, when you have won her life away from her.  If there is deception at all, then it is not worse to go on deceiving her than it was to begin to deceive her.  Tell her, if you must, while she is indifferent and will not care, not after she has given herself to you and will then have to give you up.  But what can you, a man, know what it means to a woman to tell her this!  How can you know, how can you ever, ever know!”

She covered her face with her hands and her voice broke with tears.

“Isabel—­”

“You have no right to call me by my name, and I have no right to hear it, as though nothing were changed between us.”

“I have not changed.”

“How could you tell me!  Why did you ever tell me!” she cried abruptly, grief breaking her down.

“There was a time when I did not expect to tell you.  I expected to do as other men do.”

“Ah, you would have deceived me!” she exclaimed, turning upon him with fresh suffering.  “You would have taken advantage of my ignorance and have married me and never have let me know!  And you would have called that deception love and you would have called yourself a true man!”

“But I did not do this!  It was yourself who helped me to see that the beginning of morality is to stop lying and deception.”

“But if you had this on your conscience already, what right had you ever to come near me?”

“I had come to love you!”

“Did your love of me give you the right to win mine?”

“It gave me the temptation.”

“And what did you expect when you determined to tell me this?  What did you suppose such a confession would mean to me?  Did you imagine that while it was still fresh on your lips, I would smile in your face and tell you it made no difference?  Was I to hear you speak of one whose youth and innocence you took away through her frailties, and then step joyously into her place?  Was this the unfeeling, the degraded soul you thought to be mine?  Would I have been worthy even of the poor love you could give me, if I had done that?”