Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/177

suffering unutterably . . . because a dream, a lovely priceless thing, had died. . . .

How long he remained thus he never knew; whether an interval to be measured in minutes or in hours. Or in years, It seemed to him that he lived years while he sat there. "Oh, well," he reflected grimly, "I suppose that's what 'growing up' means. Losing your faith in people and things you'd have staked your life on, once." . . . After a while this thought drew another from the whirling tumult of his brain and set it up for him to examine. Would he ever have staked his life on Yvonne's integrity? Hadn't there always been a little lurking suspicion somewhere deep within him? . . . He recalled a thousand things she had said and done, a thousand irrelevancies that had rapped at his consciousness and been stubbornly denied admittance. All so obvious now, he wondered how he could have overlooked them. "Because I tried to." That was it, of course. He had been at great pains to overlook them. "Love is blind only because it ties its own bandage over its own eyes" . . .

Well, he couldn't overlook them any more. Never any more. It was as though he had seen Yvonne only by moonlight before, and now he saw her in a cruel white calcium glare. She was older, by the calcium glare. And wiser. And wearier. But was she any less desirable? Did he love her any less? There. That was the question that had to be settled, and soon. "Do I love her any less?"

He rehearsed again all the things she had told him, carefully . . . and this time pity overrode his pain. "Rotten. Life's treated her rotten. She hasn't had a fair break, not a single one, since the beginning. Her mother and father dying, and the atmosphere of that town she lived in, and then the fellow in the war. And