She sat at her desk, a spirit of resignation coming as a sort of comfort. If she had lost love, had she lost all that there was in life? No, not that! There was something else she had found in these months: She had found herself!
Tom Beck was gone, his love for her was dead, miles were between them, and she believed she knew him well enough to understand that he had put her forever behind him. She had lost the true fulfillment of life, perhaps, but something remained. And the question came: Why not make the best of it? Why not keep what remains? Why not fight for it? Why not stand alone?
Oh, she had not known the strength that had been born of Beck's resistance to her wooing! That morning she believed that she could quit, that she could drift aimlessly, buffeted by vagrant influences, but now she knew that she could not. A compelling force had been started within her which would not down, a driving impulse to keep on, to salvage her self respect, to wrest from life what remained.
And in this she recognized that quality which Beck had planted in her, which he had nourished and coaxed and made to grow. To keep on would be rite offered at the shrine of her love for him ... though he was gone....
For a moment she cried and after that hope was born. He might return; she might even follow and make him understand. She set that back, resolutely. Tom Beck was gone from her life, she told herself, but his influence remained. That could never go; by error she had lost final achievement: love. By error she had been thrown back upon herself, her own resources, her own will.
The war that was waged upon her had been a terrifying thing yesterday; now it was even more horrible for it sought to take from her the last thing that remained to be desired, and that could not be!
She wiped her eyes angrily and repeated aloud:
"That cannot be!"
She must fight on alone; fight harder than she ever had fought in her life before. It was up to her, now, to remain fast in the face of efforts to dislodge her.
Jane paced the floor nervously, in quick, swinging strides. There was the burning of hay, the breaking of ditches; there was the shooting down of Two-Bits, the destruction of Cathedral Tank, there was the presence in the Hole of the nester and his daughter. At thought of Bobby a sharp pang shot through her. There was a woman who could dominate! There, perhaps, was the key to the puzzle.