To her he had been always, so he told
himself, a cavalier in his devotion. Without wealth, he had kept the
soles of her little feet from touching the sidewalks of life. Upon her
dainty person he had draped lovely garments. Why then, he wondered, the
vindictive expression etched, as if in aqua fortis, upon her carved
features?
Some Old World superstition held him captive as he gazed. Death is the
grand revealer, he thought; death alone stamps upon the crumbling canvas
of mortality the truth. Rhoda was dead. Yet her face was alive for the
first time. He saw its truth; and he shuddered, for he also discerned
the hate that had lurked a life long in its devious and smiling
expressions--expressions like a set of scenery pushed on and off as the
order of the play demanded. Oh, the misery of it all! He, Monross, poet,
lover, egoist, husband, to be confronted by this damnable defiance, this
early-born hate! What had he done! And in the brain cells of the man
there awakened a processional fleet of pictures: Rhoda wooed; Rhoda
dazzled; Rhoda won; Rhoda smiling before the altar; Rhoda resigned upon
that other altar; Rhoda, wife, mother; and Rhoda--dead!
But Rhoda loved--again he looked at the face.
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