She had followed him from the dark room, where she had waited near him through the night--near him, to be near him for the last time; alone with him and the kind, holy night before the morrow came which belonged to the other woman, who had written to him as she never could have written to any man in whose arms she ever had lain.

And the pity and the tragedy of it was that he loved his wife--the catfish wife.

The sharp, pitiless instinct of love told her that the stirring in his veins which had come of late to him, which beat higher, even poignantly, when she was near him now, was only the reflection of what he felt for his wife.

She knew the unmerciful truth, but it only deepened what she felt for him, yet what she must put away from herself after to-morrow.

Those verses she wrote--they were to show that she had conquered herself.