“I see.  And you did this for me, Lyn!  How little even you understood.  Now that I have the cursed money I do not know what to do with it—­how to get rid of it.  Still it was like you, Lynda, to sacrifice yourself in order that I might have what you thought was my due.  You always did that, from girlhood.  I might have known no other woman could have done what you have done, no such woman as you, Lyn, without a mighty motive; but you did not know me, really!”

And now, looking at Lynda, it was like looking at a dead face—­a face from which warmth and light had been stricken.

“I—­do not know what you—­mean, Con,” she said, vaguely.

“Being you, Lyn, you couldn’t have taken the money, yourself, particularly if you had declined to marry me.  A lesser woman would have done it without a qualm, feeling justified in outwitting so cruel a thing as the bequest; but not you!  You saw no other way, so you—­you with your high ideals and clear beliefs—­you married the man I am—­in order to—­to give me—­my own.  Oh, Lyn, what a sacrifice!”

“Stop!” Lynda rose from her chair and, by a wide gesture, swept the marks of her trade far from her.  In so doing she seemed to make space to breathe and think.

“Do you think I am the sort of girl who would sell herself for anything—­even for the justice I might think was yours?”

“Sell yourself?  Thank God, between us, Lynda, that does not enter in.”

“It would have, were I the woman your words imply.  I had nothing to gain by marrying you, nothing!  Nothing—­that is—­but—­but—­what you are unable to see.”  And then, so suddenly that Truedale could not stop her, Lynda almost ran from the room.

For an hour Truedale sat in her empty shop and waited.  He dared not seek her and he realized, at last, that she was not coming back to him.  His frame of mind was so abject and personal that he could not get Lynda’s point of view.  He could not, as yet, see the insult he had offered, because he had set her so high and himself so low.  He saw her only as the girl and woman who, her life through, had put herself aside and considered others.  He saw himself in the light such a woman as he believed Lynda to be would regard him.  He might have known, he bitterly acknowledged, that Lynda could not have overlooked in her pure woman soul the lapse of his earlier life.  He remembered how, that night of his confession, she had begged to be alone—­to think!  Later, her silence—­oh! he understood it now.  It was her only safeguard.  And that once, in the woods, when he had blindly believed in his great joy—­how she had solemnly made the best of the experience that was too deep in both hearts to be resurrected.  What a fool he had been to dream that so wrong a step as he had once taken could lead him to perfect peace.  Thinking these thoughts, how could he, as yet, comprehend the wrong he was doing Lynda?  Why, he was grieving over her, almost breaking his heart in his desire to do something—­anything—­to free her from the results of her useless sacrifice.