He had comprehended perfectly well her confession of the deception which
she had practised on them, but the portion of her letter which had
chiefly affected him had been the impassioned avowal of her love for him.
After his recent trying ordeal in striving to subject an earthly love to
spiritual conditions, culminating the night before in the renunciation of
the hope of ever marrying her at all, there was an intoxicating happiness
in the discovery that she was every whit as earthly as he, and loved him
with a passion as ardent as his own. He was a Pygmalion, whose statue had
become a woman. For the first time he now realized how far his heart had
travelled from the spirit-love which once had been enough for it, and how
impossible it was that it should ever again find satisfaction in the dim
and nebulous emotion in which it had so long rested. With a sense of
recreancy that was wholly shameless, he realized that it was no longer
Ida Ludington, but Ida Slater, whom he loved.
Little did the forlorn girl, in her self-imposed exile, imagine what a
welcome would have met her if, moved by some intuition, she had retraced
her steps that morning to the chamber which a few hours before she had
deserted.
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