What was the meaning of this strange commotion? Phantoms—of the past—presaging phantoms endlessly to follow.... At dawn she had gone out blithely enough to welcome her lover. He had come. And then.... But even before his coming, that curious battle had set in. Not his hat or the twist of his profile.... Phantoms. Phantoms rising up in her heart like some sinister cloud of retribution. And their single adversary: "You are mine, all mine...."
Now, in this sombre hour shunned by sleep, the conflict achieved an effect of climax: she felt it to be that, obscurely yet with a desperate poignancy—felt that an issue precious in the scheme of her unfolding destiny faced decision. Legions of spent loves went by in marshalled battle trim. With an inward cry she watched them as they passed. Perfume still lingering in the house, though with the guest departed. Ghosts of a many-vizaged passion, homing at length, for the fulfilment of a barter Faust-like in its essence.
How lavish she had always been: how free! Shambles, now the glamour was gone stale. A monstrous cheapening—a heart flung out to-let in a public street. Yes, how easily and extravagantly she had spent herself—a profligate spending, for what the moment could return. Here, at last, was a love that demanded: "You must be mine, all mine—you must belong to me forever!" Curious, that of them all—of all the voices that had spoken of love before—it should be Lynndal's which, in fancy, thus first framed a so momentous contract!
He had been always so modest; in the beginning, to be loved in return had figured for him as a too, too generous conjecture. Gradually, however, there had been a return. Their lives had drawn together. The fact that this love had, from almost the very beginning, been challenged to the bridging of such distance began to assume for Louise a new and arresting significance. There had been something in it, in its very fibre, rising above any mere convenience of contact: a phenomenon unique, it struck her, in the long and turbulent history of her heart interests. Those letters.... "That was just it," she had groped when confronted by Aunt Marjie. Romancing appeared to have carried her far, how far! Mirage. And yet, behind the mirage a something deeper lurked. She sensed this now; but all the weary day she had sensed it also, dimly. Lynndal. Hitherto, the man himself had barely figured. Yet ever he had been there, too. He had come from far in the west to put a ring on her finger, and had found her in a panic of goblin doubt. That fancied voice in the shriek of steam: "Mine—mine!" Then the kiss which exposed her dilemma. But behind these things—the man; the man himself. And what was this that seemed for so long, in a fine and utter silence, to have been building? Sanctuary!...
Her mind, as she lay here in the dark, became indeed a battleground for this ultimate climax of struggle. An unimagined realm they made of it. Her heart beat faster and her cheeks grew hot. To-let, in a public street. "Richard! I have done what he would have done—what he did! I am no better—no better!" She writhed, and the bitterness did not leave her—carried her instead to a yet more awful conclusion: "I am no better than a—than a—" The terrible word scorched across her heart, leaving a scar behind. Sobs shook her body, and the tears were bitter tears of hopelessness and regret.
But then, slowly, the bitterness eased a little; and, full of amazement, she felt a shy presence of freshness stealing mysteriously in, as from some empire where struggle is no citizen. A strange and beautiful sense of disentanglement. In the previous moment of unwithheld relentless purgatory, she had caught the rhythm of that something—that something behind the mirage! So that, in time, as she lay relaxed, with tears undried on her face, it came to her that just one fact remained, of all the febrile facts which, out of a long inglorious past, had attained the immortality of ghost-hood. Just one—one "living" fact: Lynndal!
Until today he had but filled a niche—but carried on the pattern of the many; now, however, the power to stem this ruinous tide revealed itself as at hand, just waiting to be seized—the courage to give herself completely, and to achieve a love as steadfast and unchanging as his had proved to be.
The night wore on. The moon grew sleepy and drooped in the starry western sky. But Louise did not sleep. There was high drama in her heart, and she could not sleep till it was all played out.
She began laying plans. What would her life be like if she married Lynndal? Dry-farming. But later he would run for Congress—perhaps he would be Governor some day. And in the meantime, love—and there would perhaps be children.... Security! Peace! An anchorage—something to steady her and set her wayward heart at rest!
"I'm the kind of girl," she told herself, with a grimness which still went hand in hand with the orgy of honesty and fearless insight that had been making these dark hours so memorable, "—the kind that must be married. I—I'm not safe otherwise—not to be trusted."