duty.  It was not her character, then, that he prized; the nobility of her nature was nothing to him; he took no thought of the fine-wrought texture of her mind.  How, then, did she appeal to him?  It was not her mind; it was not her soul.  What, then, was left?  Nothing but the physical.  The shame of it; the degradation of it!  To be so cruelly mistaken in the man she loved, to be able to appeal to him only on his lower side!  Lloyd clasped her hands over her eyes, shutting her teeth hard against a cry of grief and pain and impotent anger.  No, no, now it was irrevocable; now her eyes were opened.  The Bennett she had known and loved had been merely a creature of her own imagining; the real man had suddenly discovered himself; and this man, in spite of herself, she hated as a victim hates its tyrant.

But her grief for her vanished happiness—­the happiness that this love, however mistaken, had brought into her life—­was pitiful.  Lloyd could not think of it without the choke coming to her throat and the tears brimming her dull-blue eyes, while at times a veritable paroxysm of sorrow seized upon her and flung her at full length upon her couch, her face buried and her whole body shaken with stifled sobs.  It was gone, it was gone, and could never be called back.  What was there now left to her to live for?  Why continue her profession?  Why go on with the work?  What pleasure now in striving and overcoming?  Where now was the exhilaration of battle with the Enemy, even supposing she yet had the strength to continue the fight?  Who was there now to please, to approve, to encourage?  To what end the days of grave responsibilities, the long, still nights of vigil?

She began to doubt herself.  Bennett, the man, had loved his work for its own sake.  But how about herself, the woman?  In what spirit had she gone about her work?  Had she been genuine, after all?  Had she not undertaken it rather as a means than as an end—­not because she cared for it, but because she thought he would approve, because she had hoped by means of the work she would come into closer companionship with him?  She wondered if this must always be so—­the man loving the work for the work’s sake; the woman, more complex, weaker, and more dependent, doing the work only in reference to the man.

But often she distrusted her own conclusions, and, no doubt, rightly so.  Her mind was yet too confused to reason calmly, soberly, and accurately.  Her distress was yet too keen, too poignant to permit her to be logical.  At one time she was almost ready to admit that she had misjudged Bennett; that, though he had acted cruelly and unjustly, he had done what he thought was best.  His sacrifice of Ferriss was sufficient guarantee of his sincerity.  But this mistrust of herself did not affect her feeling toward him.  There were moments when she condoned his offence; there was never an instant she did not hate him.