Then, too, when Burr took leave, she stood before him with such a strange effect of terror and hauteur that he could do no more than touch her lips as if she had been a timid child, and bid her good-night.

Had Burr Gordon, in those days, been less aware of his own unfaithfulness and weariness, and less fiercely resolved not to yield to it, he might well have perceived Dorothy's.

As it was he confused her coldness with his own, and attributed it to the change in his own heart, and not to that in hers.

And even had he suspected it he would not have made the first motion for freedom, so desperate was his adherence to falsity for the sake of truth.
Burr Gordon had at stake in this last more than any temporal good or ill of love.

He had at stake his whole belief in himself, and he was also actuated by another motive which he scarcely admitted in his own thoughts.
Convinced he was that Madelon Hautville, believing as she did that he had forsaken her for honest love of another, would hold him in utter scorn and contempt were she to discover him false to Dorothy as she had been to her; and his very love of her love, strangely enough, kept him true to her rival.
So he went to see Dorothy, and found no fault with her coldness.