That same evening his reply came: 

“My darling, Kathleen will give you this.  I don’t care what my eyes saw if you tell me it isn’t true.  I have loved you, anyway, all the while—­even with my throat full of tears and my mouth bitter with anger, and my heart torn into several thousand tatters—­oh, it is not very difficult to love you, Duane; the only trouble is to love you in the right way; which is hard, dear, because I want you so much; and it’s so new to me to be unselfish.  I began to learn by loving you.

“Which means, that I will not let you take the risk you ask for.  Give me time; I’ve fought it off since that miserable night.  Heaven alone knows why I surrendered—­turning to my deadly enemy for countenance and comfort to support my childish and contemptible anger against you.

“Duane, there is an evil streak in me, and we both must reckon with it.  Long, long before I knew I loved you, things you said and did often wounded me; and within me a perfectly unreasoning desire to hurt you—­to make you suffer—­always flamed up and raged.

“I think that was partly what made me do what you know I did that night.  It would hurt you; that was my ignoble instinct.  God knows whether it was also a hideous sort of excuse for my weakness—­for I was blazing hot after the last dance—­and the gaiety and uproar and laughter all overexcited me—­and then what I had seen you do, and your not coming to me, and that ominous uneasy impulse stirring!

    “That is the truth as I analyse it.  The dreadful thing is that I
    could have been capable of dealing our chance of happiness such a
    cowardly blow.

“Well, it is over.  The thing has fled for a while.  I fought it down, stamped on it with utter horror and loathing.  It—­the encounter—­tired me.  I am weary yet—­from honourable wounds.  But I won out.  If it comes back again—­Oh, Duane! and it surely will—­I shall face it undaunted once more; and every hydra-head that stirs I shall kill until the thing lies dead between us for all time.

    “Then, dear, will you take the girl who has done this thing?

“GERALDINE SEAGRAVE.”

This was his answer on the eve of his departure.

And on the morning of it Geraldine came down to say good-bye; a fresh, sweet, and bewildering Geraldine, somewhat slimmer than when he had last seen her, a little finer in feature, more delicate of body; and there was about her even a hint of the spirituel as a fascinating trace of what she had been through, locked in alone behind the doors of her room and heart.

She bade him good-morning somewhat shyly, offering her slim hand and looking at him with the slight uncertainty and bent brows of a person coming suddenly into a strong light.

He said under his breath:  “You poor darling, how thin you are.”

“Athletics,” she said; “Jacob wrestled with an angel, but you know what I’ve been facing in the squared circle.  Don’t speak of it any more, will you? ...  How sunburned you are!  What have you been about since I’ve kept to my room?”