"What am I to do ?" She looked round her with the bewildered air of one who had lost her way--with the dazed appearance of one from beneath whose feet the plank of safety had been withdrawn.

It was all over--life was all over; the love that had been her life was suddenly taken from her.

Hope was dead--the past in which she had lived was all a plank--he did not love her.
She said the words over and over again to herself.

He did not love her, this man to whom she had given the passionate love of her whole heart and soul--he did not love her, and never intended to ask her to be his wife.
Why, she had lived for this! This love, lying now in ruins around her, had been her existence.

Standing there, in the first full pain of her despair, she realized what that love had been--her life, her hope, her world.