If she had died, he would have felt, all his life long, that he had sent one of the loveliest of Nature's living dreams back to the darkness and the worm, long years before her time, and with the foam of the cup of life yet on her lips.

Then a horror seized him at the presumptuousness of the liberty he had taken.

What if the beautiful creature would rather have died than have the blood of a man, one she neither loved nor knew, in her veins, and coursing through her very heart! She must never know it.
"I am very grateful," he said to himself; then smiled and wondered to whom he was grateful.
"How the old stamps and colors come out in the brain when one least expects it!" he said.

"What I meant was, _How glad I am!_" Honest as he was, he did not feel called upon to examine whether _glad_ was really the word to represent the feeling which the thought of what he had escaped, and of the creature he had saved from death, had sent up into his consciousness.

Glad he was indeed! but was there not mingled with his gladness a touch of something else, very slight, yet potent enough to make him mean _grateful_ when the word broke from him?
and if there was such a something, where did it come from?
Perhaps if he had caught and held the feeling, and submitted it to such a searching scrutiny as he was capable of giving it, he might have doubted whether any mother-instilled superstition ever struck root so deep as the depth from which that seemed at least to come.