Mary Roberts Rinehart

“ In a way he was prepared for it but nevertheless he begged for time, for a less unequivocal rejection. But he found her, for the first time, impatient with his pleadings.
“I don't want to go over and over it, Wallie. I'll take the blame. I should have done it long ago.”
She was gentle, almost tender with him, but when he said she had spoiled his life for him she smiled faintly.
“You think that now. And don't believe I'm not sorry. I am. I hate not playing the game, as you say. But I don't think for a moment that you'll go on caring when you know I don't. That doesn't happen. That's all.” ”

“ It eased her conscience toward Nina. She commenced it that evening while she waited for Wallie, and she wondered if some time she would be making an afghan for a coming child of her own. Hers and Wallace Sayre's.
Suddenly she knew she would never marry him. She faced the future, with all that it implied, and she knew she could not do it. It was horrible that she had even contemplated it. It would be terrible to tell Wallie, but not as terrible as the other thing. She saw herself then with the same clearness with which she had judged Dick. She too, leaving her havoc of wrecked lives behind her ”

“ The sheer shock of it sent him against a fence, staring after them with an anger that shook him.
Late in November Elizabeth went away for a visit, and it gave him a breathing spell. But the strain was telling on him, and Bassett, stopping on his way to dinner at the Wheelers', told him so bluntly.
“You look pretty rotten,” he said. “It's no time to go to pieces now, when you've put up your fight and won it.”
“I'm all right. I haven't been sleeping. That's all.”
“How about the business? People coming to their senses?”
“Not very fast,” Dick admitted. “Of course it's a little soon.” ”

“ Wheeler. I'm not attacking you on that score; it's human nature. But it's the truth.”
“Perhaps. I don't know.”
“They'll drive him to doing it yet. He came back to make a place for himself again, like a man. ”