The streets were deserted, only now and then some late worker like himself hurrying homeward; and as he pushed on, his footsteps echoed between the brick walls of the narrow street he was following. Somehow their clatter carried his thoughts back to Rockhaven and one night when they had sounded so loud on the plank walk there. When his room was reached he lighted a cigar, and as once before, when he had gone to the tower on Norse Hill to commune with himself, he fell into a revery.
Now, as then, it was to balance in his mind one woman's face and one woman's influence against another's.
He saw Mona as she was then, as she had been to him for months, a sweet, simple, untutored girl, with the eyes of a Madonna and the soul of a saint. He saw her in the cave, once fern-carpeted by her tender thought, and once again heard the notes from her violin quivering in that rock-walled gorge.
And now it was all ended!
Then came this other woman's face and form,—a brilliant, self-contained, self-poised, cultured exotic, knowing men's weaknesses and keen to reach and sway them. A social sun, where the other was but a pale and tender moon.
But Winn's heart was still true to Rockhaven, and the ecstatic moment, when he had held Mona close in his arms, still seemed a sacred bond.
"I'll never believe it is to end thus," he thought, "until I go there and hear it from her lips."
But he kept his promise and called on Ethel the next evening.
She had been charming always; now she was fascinating, for somehow it had come to this conquest-loving woman, that Winn's heart was elsewhere, and that was a spur.
Then beyond was a better thought, for the very indifference that piqued her also awoke respect, and he seemed to her, as she had told him, an eagle among jackdaws.