His love for Pocahontas had suffered no diminution; rather, it had increased.  His longing for her presence, for her love, was so great at times, that the thought would come to him to end the intolerable pain by stopping forever the beating of the heart that would not break.

Her second refusal had been a cruel blow to him.  He had seemed to himself so patient, so tenderly considerate; he had made allowance for the conservatism, the old world principles and prejudices amid which she had been reared; he had given her time to weigh and consider and plead.  That the verdict should have gone against him, admitted, in his mind, but of one conclusion—­Pocahontas did not love him.  Had she loved him, she must have proved responsive; love, as he understood it, did not crucify itself for a principle; it was more prone to break barriers than to erect them.  And this point of hers was no principle; it was, at noblest, an individual conscientious scruple, and to the man of the world it appeared the narrowest of bigotry.

His mind slowly settled to the conviction that she had never loved him as he had loved her—­as he still loved her.  Then began a change for the worse.  The doubt of her love begot other doubts—­a grisly brood of them—­doubt of truth, doubt of generosity and courage, doubt of disinterestedness, doubt of womanhood.  Thorne was getting in a bad way.  Over the smoldering fires of his heart a crust of cynicism began to form and harden, powdered thick with the ashes of bitterness.  What was the worth of love?—­he had found it but a fair-weather friend.  A storm—­less than a storm—­a cloud, though but as big as a man’s hand, had sent the frail thing skurrying to cover.  All ended in self—­the ego dominated the world.  Righteousness and unrighteousness arrived at the same result.  The good called it self-sacrifice, and blinded and glorified themselves; the bad were less hypocritical; they gave it no sounding name and sought it openly.  Self—­from first to last, the same under all names and all disguises.  Nay, the wicked were truer than the good, for the self-seeker inflicted no lasting injury on any save himself, while the ardor with which the self-immolator flourished the sacrificial knife imperiled other vitals than his own.

Truly, Thorne was getting into a very bad way.  His was not the nature that emits sweetness when bruised; it cankered and got black spots through it.  And he knew no physician to whom he could go for healing; no power, greater than his own, to set his disjointed life straight.  Love and faith, alike, stood afar off.  The waters of desolation encompassed his soul, without a sign of olive branch or dove.

Norma, watching him with the eyes of her heart, as well as those of her understanding, learned something of all this.  Thorne did not tell her, indeed he talked little in the days they spent together, walking or sitting on the warm dry sand of the coast, and of himself not at all.  His pain was a prisoner, and his breast its Bastile.