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Senator North

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seriously impaired. On the other hand, she had made a greater man more miserable still, and while he was finding life black enough she had rushed into the camp of the enemy; and his capacity for suffering was far deeper and more enduring than that of the younger man. She tried to put herself as much aside from the question as possible, but she had her rights and they made themselves heard. She knew, had known at once, that she had outraged all she held most dear, in engaging herself to one man when she loved another, and she had begun to wonder--in irresistible flashes--before the news had come which sent her to the mountains, if she should falter at the last moment. But breeding has carried many a woman over the ploughshares of life, and her mind was probably strong enough to go on to the inevitable without theatric climax. At the same time the idea of marriage with one man when she loved another was abhorrent; that it was particularly so since marriage with the other had become possible, she understood perfectly. And although she continued to reason and to argue, she had a lurking suspicion that while she might be strong enough to conquer a desire she might not be able to conquer a physical revolt, and that it would rout her standards and decide the issue. She had made up her mind that she would hesitate for a month and no longer, and she also had determined that she would decide the question for herself and throw none of the responsibility on Senator North; she felt the impulse to write to him impersonally more than once. (Perhaps her sense of humour also restrained her.) She wondered if it were one year or twenty years since she had gone to him for advice; and she knew that whichever way she decided, the desire for his good opinion would have something to do with it. There are only a certain number of arguments in any brain, and after they have been reiterated a sufficient number of times they pall. From argument Betty lapsed naturally into meditation, and the subject of these meditations, tender, regretful, and impassioned, was one man only; and Burleigh had no place in them. Occasionally she forced him into her mind, but he seemed as anxious to get out as she was to drive him; and after the ice melted and she was able to spend hours on the lake, and rest under spreading oaks, where she had only to shut her eyes to imagine herself companioned, she felt herself unfaithful if she cast a solitary thought to Burleigh. At the end of the month she was not tired of solitude, but she was tired of her intellectual attitude. She was human first and mental afterward; and she wanted nothing on earth but to be the wife of the man whom she had loved for a lifetime in a year. The moment she formulated this wish, hesitation fled and she could not wind up her engagement with Burleigh rapidly enough. Her letter, however, was very sweet and apologetic, and it was also very honest. She knew that unless she told him she loved another man and intended to marry him, he would take the next train for the Adirondacks and plead his cause in person. His reply was characteristic. "Very well," it ran. "I do not pretend to say I was not prepared after your last letter from New York. And although I could not guess your motive in accepting me, I knew that you did not love me. But if I am not overwhelmed with surprise, the pain is no easier on that account, and will not be until the grass has had time to grow over it a little. And at least it is a relief to know the worst. Of course I forgive you. I doubt if any man could feel bitterly toward you. You compel too much love for that. "Don't worry about me. I have work enough to do--a State to talk sense into and a nation to which to devote my poor energies. My brain such as it is will be constantly occupied, which is the next best good a man can have." ROBERT BURLEIGH. Betty wrote him four pages of enthusiastic friendliness in reply, and paid him the compliment of postponing her letter to Senator North until the following day. But on that day she rose with the feeling that the sun never would set. She was as brief as possible, for she knew that he hated long letters. Nevertheless, she conveyed an exact impression of her weeks of deliberation and analysis. "I want you to understand," she went on, "that my only wish when I came here for solitary thought was to do the right thing, irrespective of my own wishes in the matter. But it seems to me there is exactly as much to be said on one side as on the other, and it all comes to this: right or wrong, I have decided for you because I love you; and if you no longer can admire me, if you think that I have violated my sense of honour, then at least I shall marry no one else. B. M." And as her imagination was strong she did allow herself to be tortured by doubts during the three days that elapsed before she heard from him. She had hoped he would telegraph, but he did not, and her imagination and her common-sense had a long and indecisive argument which threatened ultimate depression. On the third night, however, a messenger from the hotel opposite brought her a note from Senator North. "I don't know that your mental exercise has done you any harm," he had written, "but it certainly was thrown away. You have too much common- sense and too thorough a capacity for loving to do anything so foolish or so outrageous as to marry the wrong man. If you had followed a romantic impulse--induced by nervous excitement--and married him the day you learned that your word might be put to too severe a test, you would have been miserable, and so would Burleigh. A mistaken sense of duty has been the cause of quite one fourth of the unhappiness of mankind, and few have been so bigoted as not to acknowledge this when too late. And a broken engagement is a small injustice to a man compared to a lifetime with an unloving wife. Burleigh is unhappy now, but it is no lack of admiration which prompts me to say that if he had married you he would have been unhappier still. You could do nothing by halves. "Formalities with us would be an affectation unworthy of either, and I have come to you at once. I knew that you would send for me, but I preferred to wait until you wrote that your engagement was broken.

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