really looked at her.

And I, with all my experience of him, simply because I was never able
to understand the dual nature, failed at that fatal hour when we stood
together beside our protégée to apply to the situation the knowledge
that years of experience should have taught me.

I was so bound up in my own feelings that I failed to remember that,
until then, I had never had a great emotion that his nature had not
acted as a lens in the kindling.

Then, too, there was a dense sense of the conventional--a logical
enough birthright--in my make-up. I, who had known him so long, so
well, seemed, nevertheless, when he married, to have fancied there was
some hocus-pocus in the ceremony, which should make a definite change
in a man's character, as well as a presumable change in his way of
life.

It must have been that there, in the open, at the foot of the knoll, I
slept, as one does the first night after a long awaited death, when
the relief that pain is passed, and suspense ended, deadens grief.
She was no longer in this world of torture. That helped me.

* * * * *

The next I knew, it was the sun, and not the moon which was shining on
me.

The wind had stilled its sobbing in the trees.