Eweretta was the first woman who had ever cared for him or seen any good in him. Sometimes he suffered a kind of agony of dumbness. He longed so much to make her understand how he worshipped her, and no words seemed worth anything. He would gladly have died to give her a happiness. All the love which had found no object during his whole life till he had known Eweretta concentrated now on the beautiful girl—the girl he had so wronged.
One day—it was after one of those retreats to the little wood—Alvin told Eweretta that his wrong to her had given him “hell.”
“Don’t let it do so any more, dear uncle,” she said. “So much good has come out of evil. But for that wrong I should not have had your love and poor Mrs. Le Breton’s. You would never have found out how much I love you, and Mrs. Le Breton would have pined away alone in the prairie.”
“But you lost your lover,” he reminded her.
She gave one of those mystical smiles which had moved Dan so much.
“I lost the Philip that was,” she said. “Had he married me, as he would have done had he not thought me dead, we might not have been happy. Philip had passion for me; it remained to be proved if that passion would ever become steady love.”
“But we know now that there was nothing at all between him and Miss Lane,” Alvin said. “You thought them lovers.”
“My instinct played me false there,” acknowledged Eweretta. “But you heard the sentiments expressed in the book.”
“You mean about the man deciding to marry a woman who would help him socially?”
“Yes,” answered Eweretta. “The man in Philip’s book placed a literary success before love.”