So much had happened in the past three years; there had been so much adulation and worship and daring assault upon her heart--or emotions--from quarters of unusual distinction, that the finest sense of her was blunted, and true proportions were lost.

Rudyard ought never to have made that five months' visit to South Africa a year before, leaving her alone to make the fight against the forces round her.

Those five months had brought a change in her, had made her indignant at times against Rudyard.
"Why did he go to South Africa?
Why did he not take me with him?
Why did he leave me here alone ?" she had asked herself.

She did not realize that there would have been no fighting at all, that all the forces contending against her purity and devotion would never have gathered at her feet and washed against the shores of her resolution, if she had loved Rudyard Byng when she married him as she might have loved him, ought to have loved him.
The faithful love unconsciously announces its fidelity, and men instinctively are aware of it, and leave it unassailed.

It is the imperfect love which subtly invites the siege, which makes the call upon human interest, selfishness, or sympathy, so often without intended unscrupulousness at first.