* * * * *

All the rest of that month Vandover was wretched.  So great was his shame and humiliation over this fresh disaster that he hardly dared to show himself out of doors.  His grief was genuine and it was profound.  Yet he took his punishment in the right spirit.  He did not blame any one but himself; it was only a just retribution for the thing he had done.  Only what made it hard to bear was the fact that the chastisement had fallen upon him long after he had repented of the crime, long after he had resolved to lead a new and upright life; but with shut teeth he determined still to carry out that resolve; he would devote all his future life to living down the past.  It might be hard; it might be one long struggle through many, many years, but he would do it.  Ah, yes, he would show them; they had cast him off, but he would go away to Paris now as he had always intended.  As invariably happened when he was deeply moved, he turned to his art, blindly and instinctively.  He would go to Paris now and study his paintings, five, ten years, and come back at last a great artist, when these same people who had cast him off would be proud to receive him.  Turner was right in saying that he had in him the making of a great man.  He knew that she was right; knew that if he only gave the better part of him, the other Vandover, the chance, that he would become a great artist.  Well, he would do so, and then when he came back again, when all the world was at his feet, and there were long articles in the paper announcing his arrival, these people would throng around him; he would show them what a great and noble nature he really had; he would forgive them; he would ignore what they had done.  He even dramatized a little scene between himself and Turner, then Mrs. Haight.  They would both be pretty old then and he would take her children on his lap and look at her over their heads—­he could almost see those heads, white, silky and very soft—­and he would nod at her thoughtfully, and say, “Well, I have taken your advice, do you remember?” and she was to answer, “Yes, I remember.”  There were actually tears in his eyes as he saw the scene.

At the very first he thought that he could not live without Turner; that he loved her too much to be able to give her up.  But in a little while he saw that this was not so.  She was right, too, in saying that he had long since outlived his first sincere affection for her.  He had felt for a long time that he did not love her well enough to marry her; that he did not love her as young Haight did, and he acknowledged to himself that this affair at least had ended rightly.  The two loved each other, he could see that; at last he even told himself that he would be glad to see Turner married to Dolly Haight, who was his best friend.  But for all that, it came very hard at first to give up Turner altogether; never to see her or speak to her again.