And how had he treated her when at last opportunity had been given her to play her part, to be courageous and strong, to prevail against great odds, while he stood by to see?  He had ignored and misunderstood, and tossed aside as childish and absurd that which she had been building up for years.  Instead of appreciating her heroism he had forced her to become a coward in the eyes of the world.  She had hoped to be his equal, and he had treated her as a school-girl.  It had all been a mistake.  She was not and could not be the woman she had hoped.  He was not and never had been the man she had imagined.  They had nothing in common.

But it was not easy to give Bennett up, to let him pass out of her life.  She wanted to love him yet.  With all her heart and strength, in spite of everything—­woman that she was, she had come to that—­in spite of everything she wanted to love him.  Though he had broken her will, thwarted her ambitions, ignored her cherished hopes, misunderstood and mistaken her, yet, if she could, Lloyd would yet have loved him, loved him even for the very fact that he had been stronger than she.

Again and again she tried to awaken this dead affection, to call back this vanished love.  She tried to remember the Bennett she had known; she told herself that he loved her; that he had said that the great things he had done had been done only with an eye to her approval; that she had been his inspiration no less than he had been hers; that he had fought his way back, not only to life, but to her.  She thought of all he had suffered, of the hardships and privations beyond her imagination to conceive, that he had undergone.  She tried to recall the infinite joy of that night when the news of his safe return had come to her; she thought of him at his very best—­how he had always seemed to her the type of the perfect man, masterful, aggressive, accomplishing great projects with an energy and determination almost superhuman, one of the world’s great men, whose name the world still shouted.  She called to mind how the very ruggedness of his face; with its massive lines and harsh angles, had attracted her; how she had been proud of his giant’s strength, the vast span of his shoulders, the bull-like depth of his chest, the sense of enormous physical power suggested by his every movement.

But it was all of no effect.  That Bennett was worse than dead to her.  The Bennett that now came to her mind and imagination was the brutal, perverse man of the breakfast-room at Medford, coarse, insolent, intractable, stamping out all that was finest in her, breaking and flinging away the very gifts he had inspired her to offer him.  It was nothing to him that she should stand degraded in the eyes of the world.  He did not want her to be brave and strong.  She had been wrong; it was not that kind of woman he desired.  He had not acknowledged that she, too, as well as he—­a woman as well as a man might have her principles, her standards of honour, her ideas of