“He is not your husband. He has deserted you, lured by the beauty of another woman.”
A gleam of fire flashed from her eyes, melting into a soft light.
“Yes, I know, marriage is an ideal, the noblest, most beautiful. We have not yet attained its purity in life. Man is only struggling toward its perfection. We will not attain it by lowering the ideal, but by lifting up those who are struggling toward it. Another marriage while Frank lives would be possible for me only when I ceased to feel the meaning of sin and shame. I will never regret my life. I have cast all bitterness out of my heart. Better the happiness and pain of a glorious love than never to have known its joy. I have lived.”
“And I will yet teach you to live more deeply,” he firmly said.
She shook her head and looked at him sadly out of her dark eyes from which the storm had cleared at last. They beamed now with the steady light of a deep spiritual tenderness.
CHAPTER XXI — FREEDOM AND FELLOWSHIP
The six months abroad which Gordon and Kate had spent in love’s dreaming and drifting had been the fulfilment to the man of the long-felt yearnings of his fierce subconscious nature.
To the woman it had been the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. She had found herself, the real self, at whose first meeting in the kiss of a man she had trembled. She was no longer afraid. The elemental clear-eyed goddess had taken possession. She had claimed her own, the throne of a queen, and the man who had dreamed of kingship was her courtier.