It was only Fate after all, that I blamed, yet the fatalist is human.
He suffers in living like other men--sometimes more, because he
refuses to struggle in the clutches of Chance!

As I gazed down into her white face, I heard the steps of my friend,
even above the roaring of the river, as he strode down the hillside,
out of my life! And I know not even to-day which was the bitterest
grief, the loss of my faith in being loved, or the passing from my
heart of that man!

Of the pain of the night that followed, only the silence and our own
hearts knew.

Love and passion are so twinned in some hours of life that one cannot
distinguish in himself the one from the other.

Into my keeping "to have and to hold," the law had given this
beautiful woman, "until death should us part." I loved her! But, out
of her heart, at once stronger and weaker than mine, my friend had
barred me.

It is not in hours like these, that all men can be sane.

I thought of what might have been, if they had not met that night, and
my ignoble side craved ignorance of that Chance, or the brutality to
ignore it.

I looked down into that cold face as I laid her from the arms that had
borne her down the hill--laid her on what was to have been her nuptial