He had played with fire, and was forced now to admit that the fate of the reckless had overtaken him.  He loved her.  The truth had been dawning on his mind for weeks past, but he had put it aside, willfully blinding himself because of his contentment with the present.  Now, self delusion was no longer possible; the report of his gun had blown away the last rays of it forever.  When Pocahontas lay well-nigh senseless in his arms, when her fair face rested on his breast and her breath touched his cheek, he knew, and acknowledged to himself that he loved her with a passionate intensity such as in all his careless, self-indulgent life he had never before felt for a woman.

And he had no right to love her; he was a married man.

When this idea flashed across his mind it almost stunned him.  He had been free in heart and mind so long that he had ceased to remember that he was bound in fact.  The substance had so withdrawn itself into the background of his life that he had forgotten that the shadow still rested on him.  He was free, and he was bound.  Thorne turned the idea over in his mind, as one turns a once familiar thing that has grown strange from being hidden long from sight.  Was he a married man?—­undoubtedly—­the idea appalled him.

Two years had passed since the separation and there had been no divorce.  Thorne had thought the matter out at the time, as a man must, and had decided to wait, and to let any initial steps be taken by his wife.  He had no love left for her, and he realized with grim intensity that their marriage had been a terrible mistake, but there was sufficient chivalry if his nature to make him feel that the mother of his child had claims upon him—­to make him willing, for the child’s sake, to leave her the protection of his home and name as long as she cared to keep it.  Then, too, the habit of thought in his family, and all his early influences were against divorce.  The idea had not presented itself spontaneously, as the natural solution of his domestic difficulties; he had been obliged to familiarize himself with it.  His family had been Catholics for generations, his mother had become one on her marriage, and had been ardent and devout, as is usual with proselytes.  Thorne was not a religious man himself, but he respected religion, and in an abstract way considered it a beautiful and holy thing.  He had never thought of it with any reference to his own life, but it made a halo around the memory of his mother.  Her views had influenced him in his decision in the matter of a divorce.  The world had given him credit for religious scruples of his own, but the world had done him more than justice; he was only haunted by the ghosts of his mother’s scruples.