Nella-Rose grasped the deep meaning after a moment and sank back shivering.  The courage and endurance that had borne her to this hour deserted her.  The help, that for a time had seemed to rise up in Lynda, crumbled.  Alone, drifting she knew not where, Nella-Rose waited.

“I’m—­afraid!” she repeated over and over.  “I’m right afraid.  He’s not the same; it’s all, all gone—­that other life—­and yet I cannot let him think—!”

The two women looked at each other over all that separated them—­and each comprehended!  The soul of Nella-Rose demanded justification—­vindication—­and Lynda knew that it should have it, if the future were to be lived purely.  There was just one thing Lynda had to make clear in this vital moment, one truth that must be understood without trespassing on the sacred rights of others.  Surely Nella-Rose should know all that there was to know before coming to her final decision.  So Lynda spoke: 

“You think he”—­she could not bring herself, for all her bravery and sense of justice, to speak her husband’s name—­“you think he remembers you as something less than you were, than you are?  Nella-Rose, he never has!  He did not understand, but always he has held you sacred.  Whatever blame there may have been—­he took it all.  It was because he could; because it was possible for him to do so, that I loved him—­honoured him.  Had it been otherwise, as truly as God hears me, I could not have trusted him with my life.  That—­that marriage of yours and his was as holy to him as, I now see, it was to you; and he, in his heart, has always remembered you as he might a dear, dead—­wife!”

Having spoken the words that wrung her heart, Lynda sank back exhausted.  Then she made her first—­her only claim for herself.

“It was when everything was past and his new life began—­his man’s life—­that I entered in.  He—­he told me everything.”

Nella-Rose bent over her sleeping child, and a wave of compassion overflooded her thought.

“I—­I must think!” she whispered, and closed her lovely eyes.  What she saw in the black space behind the burning lids no one could know, but her tangled little life must have been part of it.  She must have seen it all—­the bright, sunlit dream fading first into shadow, then into the dun colour of the deserted hills.  Burke Lawson must have stood boldly forth, in his supreme unselfishness and Godlike power, as her redeemer—­her man!  The gray eyes suddenly opened and they were calm and still.

“I—­I only wanted him—­to remember me—­like he once did,” she faltered.  She was taking her last look at Truedale.  “So long as he—­he didn’t think me—­less; I reckon I don’t want him—­to think of me as I am—­now.”

“Suppose”—­the desperate demand for full justice to Nella-Rose drove Lynda on—­“suppose it were in your power and mine to sweep everything aside; suppose I—­I went away.  What would you do, Nella-Rose?”

Again the eyes closed.  After a moment: