prisoner and brought him to his mother.

Jeffrey turned a long searching gaze down into his mother's eyes as he
stooped to kiss her. What he saw filled him with a bitterness that all
the years of his life would not efface. What he saw was not the
sprightly, cheery, capable woman who had been his mother, but a grey,
trembling old woman, broken in body and heart, who clung to him
fainting and crying weakly. What men had done to him, he could shake
off. They had not hurt him. He could still defy them. But what they
had done to his little mother, that would rankle and turn in his
heart forever. He would never forgive them for the things they had
done to her in these four weeks and in these two days.

And here at his elbow stood the one person who had to-day done more to
hurt his mother and himself than any other in the world could have
done. She could have told his mother weeks ago, and have saved her all
that racking sorrow and anxiety. But no, for the sake of that religion
of hers, for the sake of what some priest told her, she had stuck to
what had turned out to be a useless lie, to save a dead man's name.

Ruth stood there reaching out her hands to him. But he turned upon her
with a look of savage, fleering contempt; a look that stunned the girl
as a blow in the face would have done. Then in a strange, hard voice
he said brutally:

"You lied!"

Ruth dropped her eyes pitifully under the shock of his look and words.
Even now she could not speak, could not appeal to his reason, could
not tell him that she had heard nothing but what had come under the
awful seal of the confessional. The secret was out. She had risked his
life and lost his love to guard that secret, and now the world knew
it. All the world could talk freely about what she had done except
only herself. Even if she could have reached up and drawn his head
down to her lips, even then she could not so much as whisper into his
ear that he was right, or try to tell him why she had not been able
to speak. She saw the secret standing forever between their two lives,
unacknowledged, embittering both those lives, yet impassable as the
line of death.

When she looked up, he was gone out to his freedom in the sunlight.

The hill people were jammed about the door and in the street as he
came out. Twenty hands reached forward to grasp him, to draw him into
the midst of their crowd, to mount him upon his own horse which they
had caught wandering in the high hills