thought otherwise?... Don't you suppose I realize what cause I've given
you to--to distrust and dislike me? You'd be more than human if you
could forgive and forget--what I said to you one night. How could you,
when it was so unforgivable? And since then--"

"_Don't!_" Carlisle said, in a muffled sort of voice. And then, clearly
and distinctly: "Don't!... I can't quite stand that!"

She turned on the old floor, with the sound of her own strengthening
voice, and came again face to face with the man, V.V. There had seemed
to come to her a light. And back into her smooth young cheek trickled
that color so loved by her betrothed, who had not bought the Settlement
House after all....

She was a brilliantly successful girl, the chosen wife of the most
shiningly eligible of men; and he was a lame slum doctor in a worn-out
suit, beneath her notice as a man altogether. And yet, as Hugo stood
above her in all those material aspects which had always summed up her
whole demand of life, so this man stood above her in some more subtle
and mysterious way. And it had always been so: by bright swift flickers
of intuition she had seemed suddenly to see that now. All the
restlessness and discontent which the thought and sight of him had power
to awake in her from the beginning came from just this; and she had
never been able to put him down, no matter how she had chafed and
denounced, because the final fact had always been that he, in his queer
way, stood above her ...

And now, in this unsteadied moment, with all hope of bringing him down
beaten finally to death, there had seemed to rise and beckon a finer way
of bridging this gap between them. All that was best in the girl