"If we are to forget each other," he replied quietly and without looking at her, "we had better begin at once."
"But surely we may be friends?" she questioned.
"It is not a question of friendship," he answered, "but of forgetting, or of trying to forget."
"But I don't want to forget," she said impulsively. "I could not if I tried. A woman never forgets. I want to remember you, to think of your courage, your—your——"
"Folly," he interrupted.
She looked at him with a startled expression in her eyes.
"Is it folly to love?" she questioned.
"Yes, out of your own station. If I had loved anyone else but you——"
"No, no! Don't say that," she interrupted. "God knows best. We are strengthened and made better by the painful discipline of life."
He took her outstretched hand and held it for a moment, then raised it to his lips. So they parted. He could not feel angry or resentful. She was so sweet, so gentle, so womanly, that she compelled his reverence. It was better to have loved her and lost, than to have won any other woman on earth.