Marien Dounay loved him, but for the sake of her own ambition was trying to kill that love. This was the explanation which the sleepless, tossing hours fed again and again into John Hampstead's mind until he accepted it as the demonstrated truth.
As for himself, he could no more have killed his love for Marien than he could have killed a child. He determined deliberately to match his will against hers and break it; to see her again immediately, to meet her arguments with better arguments, her firm rejections with firmer affirmations; to melt her resolution with an appeal to her heart; in short, and by some means not now clear, to overmaster her purpose for the sake of her own happiness as well as his.
But a thought of Bessie Mitchell came crowding in. Now this was not altogether strange, since John had half-consciously cherished the notion that he would some day love Bessie, and he reflected now that she must have had a feeling of the same sort toward himself. Perhaps this was why she cried that day upon the rocks; perhaps, too, that was why he kissed her, for he was beginning now to understand some things better than he had before. Conscience demanded therefore that he write Bessie a tactful letter which, while vague and general, would yet somehow reveal the tremendous change in the drift of his affections.
Just that much, however, was going to be hard—a
