first lie was spoken--she was
pleading for the man who had blackened his friend's honour that he might
shield his own--she was pleading though she knew his baseness. The very
nobility of her posture--the nobility that he had found outwardly in no
other woman--hardened the man before her. The cold brow, the fervent
mouth, the fearless eyes, the lines with which Time had chastened into
womanliness her girlish figure--these had become the expression of an
invincible regret. As he faced her the iron of his nature held him as in
a vise, for life, which had made him a just man, had not made him a
gentle one.

But her spirit had risen to match with his. "He wronged you once," she
said; "let it pass--we have all been young and very ignorant; but we do
not make our lives, thank God."

He looked at her in silence.

Then, as he stood there, the walls of the room passed from before his
eyes, and the gray light from the western window was falling upon the
white road beyond the cedars. The vague pasture swept to the far-off
horizon where hung the solitary star above the sunset. From the west a
light wind blew, and into their faces dead leaves whirled from denuded
trees far distant. But surest of all was this--he hated now as he hated
then. "As for him--may God, in His mercy, damn him," he had said.

"Because he wronged you do not wrong yourself," she spoke fearlessly,
but she fell back with an upward movement of her hands. The man was
before her as the memory had been for years--she knew the distorted
features, the convulsed, closed mouth, the furrow that cleft the
forehead like a scar. She saw the savage as she had seen it once before,
and she braved it now as she had braved it then.

"You are hard--as hard as life," she said.

"Life is as we make it," he retorted. He lifted her muff from the desk
and she took it from him, turning towards the door. As he followed her
into the hall he spoke slowly: "I shall read the papers that relate to
the case," he said. "I shall do my duty. You were mistaken if you
supposed that your coming to me would influence my decision. Personal
appeal rarely avails and is often painful."

He unlatched the outer door and she passed out and descended the steps.

When he returned to the fire he was shivering from the draught let in by
the opening doors, and, lifting the fallen poker, he attacked almost
fiercely the slumbering coals. The physical shock had not tempered the
rage within; he felt it gnaw