In her first shock, even while the blow still blinded her eyes, she turned to seek wildly for some possible solution; and it was then that she discovered that the letter, in Kemper’s handwriting, was addressed evidently to some other woman, since it bore the date of a day in June just three years before she had first met him.  Three years ago he had declared himself to belong, heart and soul, to this other woman; and to-day, with no remembrance in his mind, it seemed, of that former passion, he could repeat quite as ardently the old threadbare avowal.  How many times, she asked herself, had he used that characteristic ending to his love letters?—­and the thing appeared to her suddenly to be the veriest travesty of the perfect self-surrender of love.

She was a woman capable of keen retrospective jealousy, and as she sat there, beaten down from her winged ecstasy by the blow that had struck at her from the silence, she told herself passionately that her life was wrecked utterly and her brief happiness at an end.  Then, with that relentless power of intellect, from which her emotions were never entirely separated, she began deliberately to disentangle the true facts from the temporary impulses of her jealous anger.

“I am wounded and yet why am I wounded and by what right?” she demanded, with a pathetic groping after the self-condemnation which would acquit her lover, “he has lived his life, I know—­I have always known it—­and his letter has only brought forcibly before me a fact which I have accepted though I have not faced it.”  And it occurred to her, with the bitter sweetness of a consoling lie, that he could not have been false to her three years ago, since he was not then even aware of her existence.  To dwell on this thought was like yielding to the power of an insidious drug, and yet she found herself forcing it almost deliriously against her saner judgment.  “How could he wrong me so long as I was a stranger to him?” she repeated over and over.  “On the day that he first loved me, his old life, with its sins and its selfish pleasures, was blotted out.”  But her conscience, even while she reasoned, told her that love could possess no power like this—­that the man who loved her to-day, was the inevitable result of the man who had loved other women yesterday, and that there was as little permanence in the prompting of mere impulse as there was stability in change itself.  So the voice within her spoke through the intolerable clearness of her intellect; and in her frantic desire to drown the thing it uttered, she repeated again and again the empty words which her heart prompted.  Yet she knew even though she urged the falsehood upon her thoughts, that it was less her argument that pleaded for Kemper than the memory of a look in his face at animated instants, which rose now before her and appealed disturbingly to her emotions.