"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.