The old colored mammy was right.  “They just grew apart,” as it was inevitable that they should.  Perfect self-manifestation is the true principle and law of love, and when a guilty secret comes between two lovers, suspicion and fear inevitably result.  They become incomprehensible to each other.

David’s secret preyed upon him night and day like that insect which, having once entered the brain of an elk, gnaws ceaselessly at it until the miserable victim’s last breath is drawn.  While he retained for Pepeeta a devotion which tormented him with its intensity, his guilt made him tremble in her presence.  He shuddered when he approached her, like a worshiper who enters a shrine with a stolen offering.  Instead of calming and soothing him as she would have done had he only suffered some misfortune instead of committing a sin, she filled him with an unendurable agitation.  If the nerves are diseased, a flute can rasp them as terribly as a file.

As for Pepeeta, she must have been bewildered by this phenomenon which she could not possibly comprehend, for while she saw her lover swayed from his orbit she could not see the planet which produced the disturbance.  Feeling that he had not given her his full confidence she resented his distrust, and as his melancholy and irritability increased, withdrew more and more into herself, and in that solitude sought the companionship of God.

It was a frightful discipline; but she was sanctified by it.

Day by day she became more patient, gentle and resigned, and in proportion as she grew in these graces, her lover’s awe and fear increased, and so they drifted farther and farther apart.

Such relationships cannot continue forever, and they generally terminate in tragedy.

After the first few months’ excitement of his new life, David’s conscience began to torment him anew.  He became melancholy, then moody, and finally fell into the habit of sitting for hours among the crowds which swarmed the gambling rooms, brooding over his secret.  From stage to stage in the evolution of his remorse he passed until he at last reached that of superstition, which attacks the soul of the gambler as rust does iron.  And so the wretched victim of many vices sat one evening at the close of the second year with his hat drawn down over his eyes, reflecting upon his past.

“What’s the matter, Davy?” asked a player who had lost his stake, and was whistling good-humoredly as he left the room.

“Nothing,” he muttered.

“Brace up, old man!  There is no use taking life so hard!  You’ve got everything, and I’ve got nothing; and I am happy and you are miserable.  Brace up, I say!” And with that he slapped him familiarly on the shoulder.

“Leave me alone,” David growled, and reached for a glass mug containing a strong decoction to which he was resorting more and more as his troubles grew intolerable.  A strange thing happened!  As he put it to his lips its bottom dropped upon the table and the contents streamed into his lap and down to the floor.  It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, for it had aroused a superstitious terror.