And then for an hour or two Truedale walked the city streets perplexed and distraught.  He was being absorbed without his own volition.  By a subtle force he was convinced that he was part of a scheme bigger and stronger than his own desires and inclinations.  Unless he was prepared to play a coward’s role he must adjust his thoughts and ideas to coincide with the rules and regulations of the game of life and men.  With this knowledge other and more blighting convictions held part.  In his defiance and egotism he had muddled things in a desperate way.  In the cold, clear light of conventional relations the past few weeks, shorn of the glamour cast by his romantic love and supposed contempt for social restrictions, stood forth startlingly significant.  At the moment Truedale could not conceive how he had ever been capable of playing the fool as he had!  Not for one instant did this realization affect his love and loyalty to Nella-Rose; but that he should have been swept from his moorings by passion, reduced him to a state of contempt for the folly he had perpetrated.  And, he thought, if he now, after a few days, could so contemplate his acts how could he suppose that others would view them with tolerance and sympathy?

No; he must accept the inevitable results of his action.  His love, his earnest intention of some day living his own life in his own way, were to cost him more than he, blinded by selfishness and passion in the hills, had supposed.

Well, he was ready to pay to the uttermost though it cost him the deepest heart-ache.  As he was prepared to undertake the burden his uncle’s belief in him entailed, so he was prepared, now that he saw things clearly, to forego the dearest and closest ties of his old life.

He wondered how he could ever have dreamed that he could go to Lynda and Brace with his amazing confession and expect them, in the first moment of shock, to open their hearts and understand him.  He almost laughed, now, as he pictured the absurdity.  And just then he drew himself up sharply and came to his conclusion.

He could not lay himself bare to any one as a sentimental ass; he must arrange things as soon as possible to return South; he would, just before starting, tell Lynda and Brace of his attachment for Nella-Rose.  They would certainly understand why, in the stress and strain of recent events, he had not intruded his startling news before.  He would neither ask nor expect sympathy or cooperation.  He must assume that they could not comprehend him.  This was going to be the hardest wrench of his life, Truedale recognized that, but it was the penalty he felt he must pay.

Then he would go—­for his wife!  He would secure her privately, by all the necessary conventions he had spurned so madly—­he would bring her to his people and leave to her sweetness and tender charm the winning of that which he, in his blindness, had all but lost.

So, in this mood, he returned to his uncle’s house and wrote a long letter to Nella-Rose.  He phrased it simply, as to a little child.  He reminded her of the old story she had once told him of her belief that some day she was to do a mighty big thing.