I will settle with John Graham, if God gives me the chance." "You would have me stop _now_--before I have told you of the only shred of triumph to which I may lay claim!" she protested.

"Oh, you may be sure that I realize the sickening folly and wickedness of it all, but I swear before my God that I didn't realize it then, until it was too late.

To you, Alan, clean as the great mountains and plains that have been a part of you, I know how impossible this must seem--that I should marry a man I at first feared, then loathed, then came to hate with a deadly hatred; that I should sacrifice myself because I thought it was a duty; that I should be so weak, so ignorant, so like soft clay in the hands of those I trusted.

Yet I tell you that at no time did I think or suspect that I was sacrificing _myself_; at no time, blind though you may call me, did I see a hint of that sickening danger into which I was voluntarily going.

No, not even an hour before the wedding did I suspect that, for it had all been so coldly planned, like a great deal in finance--so carefully adjudged by us all as a business affair, that I felt no fear except that sickness of soul which comes of giving up one's life.