"Well, I'll speak for myself, not for the hosts of single-hearted women. I won't tar them with my black brush. You want me to marry you, Myles?"
"God knows how dearly."
"And because I love you, you think I ought to marry you. Yet if I love somebody else too? I wish I had fine words, though perhaps plain ones are better to describe such an unheroic muddle. When I told Christo I loved you—yes, I told him that—he bowed his head as though he had heard his death knell. Yet I did not tell him I loved him less than before."
"You still love him?"
"Of course I do. Can a quarrel kill a live love? He was made for somebody to love him. And I love you—love you dearly too. And I'm not ashamed of it, however much you may think I should be."
"The end of that?" he said drearily.
"Clear enough. I've spoilt two lives—no, not all, I hope, but a part of two lives."
"It is I that have done so," he answered bitterly and slowly; then he stopped his horse and looked aloft where scattered flakes and patches of snow began to float heavily downward from the upper grey.
"No, no, no," said Honor. "It's just a snappy, snarling, unkind fate that wills it so. Two's company, and three's none, of course."
"Your knowledge is imperfect," he said, "and so your argument is vain. If you were a type, the foundation of civilisation would fail. Surely no woman worth thinking of twice can love in two places at once?"