Part Two Chapter 19 The Furnace

The bridal dress with its filmy veil still lay in its white box--a fairy garment that had survived the catastrophe. Dinah sat and looked at it dully. The light of her single candle shimmered upon the soft folds. How beautiful it was!

She had been sitting there for hours, after a terrible scene with her mother downstairs, and from acute distress she had passed into a state of torpid misery that enveloped her like a black cloud. She felt almost too exhausted, too numbed, to think. Her thoughts wandered drearily back and forth. She was sure she had been very greatly to blame, yet she could not fix upon any definite juncture at which she had begun to go wrong. Her engagement had been such a whirlwind of Fate. She had been carried off her feet from the very beginning. And the deliverance from the home bondage had seemed so fair a prospect. Now she was plunged, back again into that bondage, and she was firmly convinced that no chance of freedom would ever be offered to her again. Yet she knew that she had done right to draw back. Regret it though she might again and again in the bitter days to come, she knew--and she would always know--that at the eleventh hour she had done right.

She had been true to the greatest impulse that had ever stirred her soul. It had been at a frightful cost. She had sacrificed everything--everything--to a vision that she might never realize. She had cast away all the glitter and the wealth for this far greater thing which yet could never be more to her than a golden dream. She had even cast away love, and her heart still bled at the memory. But she had been true--she had been true.