"What have I done? What have I done?" Hector groaned to himself in
anguish as he paced up and down his room at the Ritz an hour after the
party had broken up, and he had driven Mrs. McBride back in his
automobile, leaving hers to father and daughter.
All through supper Theodora had sat limp and white as death, and every
time she had looked at him her eyes had reminded him of a fawn he had
wounded once at Bracondale, in the park, with his bow and arrow, when he
was a little boy. He remembered how fearfully proud he had been as he
saw it fall, and then how it had lain in his arms and bled and bled, and
its tender eyes had gazed at him in no reproach, only sorrow and pain,
and a dumb asking why he had hurt it.
All the light of the stars seemed quenched, no eyes in the world had
ever looked so unutterably pathetic as Theodora's eyes, and gradually as
they sat and talked platitudes and chaffed with the elderly fiancées, it
had come to him how cruel he had been--he who had deliberately used
every art to make her love him--and now, having gained his end, what
could he do for her? What for himself? Nothing but sorrow faced them
both. He had taken brutal advantage of her gentleness and
innocence--when chivalry alone should have made him refrain.
He saw himself as he was--the hunter and she the hunted--and the
knowledge that he would pay with all the anguish and regret of a
passionate, hopeless love--perhaps for the rest of his life--did not
balance things to his awakened soul. If his years should be one long,
gnawing ache for her, what of hers? And she was so young. His life, at
all events, was a free one; but hers tied to Josiah Brown! And this
thought drove him to madness. She belonged to Josiah Brown--not to him
whom she loved--but to Josiah Brown, plebeian and middle-aged and
exacting. He knew now that he ought to have gone away at once, the next
day after they had met. His whole course of conduct had been weak and
absolutely self-indulgent and wicked.
Who was he to dare to have raised his eyes to this angel, and try to
scorch even the hem of her clothing! And now he had only brought
suffering upon her and dimmed the light in God's two stars, which were
her eyes.
And then wild passion shook him, and he could only live again the divine
moments when she had nestled unresisting in his arms. Would it have made
things better or worse if he had not yielded to the temptation of that
hour of night and solitude?