"If the angels could see me now," she said, "and know what was in my heart, they'd die of envy."
"And what's in your heart, Hilda?"
"You," she said.
The house where she was staying had an inner and an outer door. In the obscurity between these two we stood for a little while at parting, and kissed each other.
And as soon thereafter as could be, we were quietly married.
When I began to put down this story about the Fultons, I was still head over heels in love with Lucy, and I did not know how it was all going to end. And I don't know now. I began to write before Hilda became a definite figure in my life, to write in order to pass the time. And so I wrote until I realized that I had failed Lucy, and began to hope that she had failed me. Even then I expected to live the same old fleeting life of a butterfly bachelor to the end. Then I began to think that out of the thing I was writing, there was beginning to rise a kind of lesson, a preachment. It seemed to me that I was going through an experience that others would do well to know about.
Can a man live down the shame of scorching another man's happiness, after finding that the cause which drove him to do so, has lost its power to impel? I am not ashamed of having loved Lucy; I am ashamed of not having loved her enough. Thank God no greater harm was done to Fulton than was done. He has his Lucy, what there is left of her, his children, and a greater financial success than ever he hoped for. And he has had his triumph over me. He must have told her, in some of his bad moments, just what kind of a man I was—a waster, a male flirt, a man who had the impulse to raise the devil, but lacked the courage, and the character. And she knows now, after her short period of over-powering love for me and belief in me, that he was right. That is his triumph. I think he is too good a gentleman to rub it in.
My father and mother accepted Hilda with the sweetest good grace. She was not what they had hoped for; she was not what they had expected or feared. To my father it seemed, he was good enough to say so, that I had played the man. And he could not, he said, help loving any woman, whether she came from the roof of the world or its cellar, who had loved his son so faithfully and so long.
And the rings on Hilda's finger, and the pride in her new estate, and the pretty clothes that my mother helped her to buy worked a wondrous change in her. People couldn't help looking after her, she was so pretty, so graceful, and had so much faith and worship in her eyes.
We had put off our date of sailing a little, so that my friends might see that I was not ashamed of what I had done, but that I gloried in it, and that my parents showed a face of approval to the world. Those days of postponement were, I think, the best days of my life. A treasure had been given into my guardianship, and it seemed to me that I was going to be worthy of the trust.