“I must have fallen asleep, for the first thing I remember was his saying in most pleading tones, ‘Come in here a moment, dear, and let me love you, as only I can love you.’
“She danced into the darkened room beside him and he led her across it to the large leather couch. He picked her up bodily and laid her on the couch, and before she could demur, had she been so inclined, he was bending over her and raining fervent kisses upon her and she nestled up to him and sighed in an abandonment of ecstacy, fearing nothing, hoping nothing, only living in the delight of the moment.
“I don’t know how I expected her to resist him; in fact, I’m sure I didn’t. I would have saved her, but for the fact that I seemed as if in a nightmare, unable to move or utter a sound. I lived hours in those moments.
“After awhile I heard a sobbing. Then his voice, all tenderness and commiseration, ‘There, there, dear, don’t cry. You are all right. Don’t feel so badly; we are just human, and are no worse than hundreds of others.’
“‘Humph!’ thought I, suffering though I was, ‘there is a great deal of consolation in that!’
“Gradually the sobs ceased, and then he bade her good-night. I knew she would not go into my room this night, so had no need to fear my absence from my room would be discovered.
“What I suffered that night, only God knows. I laid there all night in my misery, freezing and burning by turns. It seemed to me my hair must be gray. My idol was shattered, it lay in fragments at my feet, but alas! as with the shattered vase, round which the scent of the roses still clung, so did the virtues with which I had endowed this being continue to obtrude themselves to the complete obliteration of the crime he had committed before my very eyes.
“At daybreak I went to my room and bathed my haggard face and tried to make myself presentable, at least, to Gretta when she should come in to see me. I had not decided what to do for the immediate present, only that I would say nothing.
“Much to my surprise, Gretta came in beaming as usual, her volatile spirits were incapable of more than momentary depression, and I wondered vaguely if it could all be a horrible dream.
“Out of the chaos of my brain one idea resolved itself, and that was to tell him all after she left, unless he, in his desire to right the wrong, asked for his release.