Sometimes when the memory of that great deep love she had heard expressed for herself came over her, the bitter tears would come to her eyes and one thought would throb through her consciousness: "Not worthy! Not worthy!" He had not thought her fit to be his wife. Her father and her world would think it quite otherwise. They would count him unworthy to mate with her, an heiress, the pet of society; he a man who had given up his life for a whim, a fad, a fanatical fancy! But she knew it was not so. She knew him to be a man of all men. She knew it was true that she was not such a woman as a man like that could fitly wed, and the thought galled her constantly.
She tried to accustom herself to think of him as a pleasant experience, a friend who might have been if circumstances with them both had been different; she tried to tell herself that it was a passing fancy with them which both would forget; and she tried with all her heart to forget, even locking away the precious little book and trying to forget it too.
And then, one day in late summer, she went with a motoring party through New England; as frolicsome and giddy a party as could be found among New York society transferred for the summer to the world of Nature. There was to be a dance or a house party or something of the sort at the end of the drive. Hazel scarcely knew, and cared less. She was becoming utterly weary of her butterfly life.
The day was hot and dusty, Indian summer intensified. They had got out of their way through a mistake of the chauffeur, and suddenly just on the edge of a tiny quaint little village the car broke down and refused to go on without a lengthy siege of coaxing and petting.
The members of the party, powdered with dust and in no very pleasant frame of mind from the delay, took refuge at the village inn, an old-time hostelry close to the roadside, with wide, brick-paved, white-pillared piazza across the front, and a mysterious hedged garden at the side. There were many plain wooden rockers neatly adorned with white crash on the piazza, and one or two late summer boarders loitering about with knitting work or book. The landlord brought cool tinkling glasses of water and rich milk from the spring-house, and they dropped into the chairs to wait while the men of the party gave assistance to the chauffeur in patching up the car.