Jane kept her seat, her head resting on her hand, the letter once more in her lap.

The revulsion of feeling had paralyzed her judgment, and for a time had benumbed her emotions.

All she saw was Archie's eyes looking into hers as he waited for an answer to that question he would one day ask and which now she knew she could never give.
Then there rose before her, like some disembodied spirit from a long-covered grave, the spectre of the past.

An icy chill crept over her.

Would Lucy begin this new life with the same deceit with which she had begun the old?
And if she did, would this Frenchman forgive her when he learned the facts?
If he never learned them--and this was most to be dreaded--what would Lucy's misery be all her life if she still kept the secret close?
Then with a pathos all the more intense because of her ignorance of the true situation--she fighting on alone, unconscious that the man she loved not only knew every pulsation of her aching heart, but would be as willing as herself to guard its secret, she cried: "Yes, at any cost she must be saved from this living death! I know what it is to sit beside the man I love, the man whose arm is ready to sustain me, whose heart is bursting for love of me, and yet be always held apart by a spectre which I dare not face." With this came the resolve to prevent the marriage at all hazards, even to leaving Yardley and taking the first steamer to Europe, that she might plead with Lucy in person.
While she sat searching her brain for some way out of the threatened calamity, the rapid rumbling of the doctor's gig was heard on the gravel road outside her open window.