There could be no beginnings for her, because she had already reached the end--reached it with such a stupefying suddenness that for a time she had been hardly conscious of pain, but only of a fierce, intolerable resentment and of a pride--that "devil's own pride" which Patrick had told her was the Tennant heritage--which had been wounded to the quick.
Garth had taken that pride of hers and ground it under his heel.

He had played at love, and she had been fool enough to mistake love's simulacrum for the real thing.

Or, if there had been any genuine spark of love kindling the fire of passion that had blazed about her for one brief moment, then he had since chosen deliberately to disavow it.
He had indicated his intention unmistakably.

Since the day of the luncheon party at Greenacres he had shunned meeting her whenever possible, and, on the one or two occasions when an encounter had been unavoidable, his manner had been frigidly indifferent and impersonal.
Outwardly she had repaid him in full measure--indifference for indifference, ice for ice, gallantly matching her woman's pride against his deliberate apathy, but inwardly she writhed at the remembrance of that day on the island, when, in the stress of her terror for his safety, she had let him see into the very heart of her.
Well, it was over now, and done with.

The brief vision of love which had given a new, transcendent significance to the whole of life, had faded swiftly into bleak darkness, its memory marred by that bitterest of all knowledge to a woman--the knowledge that she had been willing to give her love, to make the great surrender, and that it had not been required of her.