Pocahontas gazed at him in bewilderment, her mind grappling with an idea that appalled her, her face blanching with apprehension, and her form cowering as from an expected blow.

“Must I understand, Mr. Thorne, that love for me suggested the thought of divorcing your wife?” she questioned hoarsely—­“that I came between you and caused this horrible thing?  It is not—­it can not be true.  God above!  Have I fallen so low?—­am I guilty of this terrible sin?”

Thorne’s quick brain recognized instantly the danger of allowing this idea to obtain possession of her mind.  Fool! he thought furiously, why had not he been more cautious, more circumspect.  Dextrously he set himself to remove the idea or weaken its force—­to prove her guiltless in her own eyes.

“Princess,” he said, meeting the honest, agonized eyes squarely, “I want to tell you the story of my marriage with Ethel Ross, and of my subsequent life with her.  I had not intended to harass you with it until later—­if at all; but now, I deem it best you should become acquainted with it, and from my lips.  It will explain many things.”

Then he briefly related all the miserable commonplace story.  He glossed over nothing, palliated nothing; bearing hardly now on his wife, and again on himself, but striving to show throughout how opposed to true marriage was this marriage, how far removed from a perfect union was this union.  Pocahontas listened with intense, strained interest, following every word, sometimes almost anticipating them.  Her heart ached for him—­ached wearily.  Life had been so hard upon him; he had suffered so.  With a woman’s involuntary hardness to woman, she raised the blame from Thorne’s shoulders and heaped it upon those of his wife.  Her love and her sympathy became his advocates and pleaded for him at the bar of her judgment.  Her heart yearned over him with infinite compassion.

If Thorne had kept silence, and left the matter there, and waited until she should have adapted herself to the new conditions, should have assimilated the new influences, which crowded thick upon her, it would have been better.  But he could not keep silent—­he had no patience to wait.  He could not realize that the things which were as a thrice-told tale to him, had an overwhelming newness for her.  That the influences which had molded his thought, were very far removed from the influences which had made her what she was.  He could not understand that, while the world had progressed, this isolated community had remained stationary, and that the principles and rules of conduct among them, still, were those which had governed his world in the beginning of the century.