suspected nothing,
and that she expected to live a faithful wife to him and be the
mother of his children. The child had been adopted, the traces of
its parentage had been wiped out, those who had adopted it could do
more for its life and honor than he could. She begged him not to
try to find her or ruin her by communicating the past to her
husband. That's about all."

"The old tragedy--old except to them."

"Old enough. Were we not speaking the other day of how the old
tragedies are the new ones? I get something new out of this; you
get the old. What strikes me about it is that the man has declined
to shirk--that he has felt called upon not to injure any other life
by his silence. I wish I had a right to call it the mettle of a
young American, his truthfulness. As he put the case to me, what
he got out of it was this: Here was a girl deceiving her husband
about her past--otherwise he would never have married her. As the
world values such things, what it expected of Rowan was that he
should go off and marry a girl and conceal his past. He said that
he would not lie to a classmate in college, he would not cheat a
professor; was it any better silently to lie to and cheat the woman
that he loved and expected to make the mother of his children?
Whatever he might have done with any one else, there was something
in the nature of the girl whom he did come to love that made it
impossible: she drove untruthfulness out of him as health drives
away disease. He saved his honor with her, but he lost her."

"She saved her honor through giving up him. But it is high ground,
it is a sad hilltop, that each has climbed to."

"Hardage, we can climb so high that we freeze."

They turned back. The Judge spoke again with a certain sad pride:

"I like their mettle, it is Shakespearean mettle, it is American
mettle. We lie in business, and we lie in religion, and we lie to
women. Perhaps if a man stopped lying to a woman, by and by he
might begin to stop lying for money, and at last stop lying with
his Maker. But this boy, what can you and I do for him? We can
never tell the truth about this; and as we can try to clear him,
unless we ourselves lie, we shall leave him the victim of a flock
of lies."

Isabel remained at home a week.

During her first meeting with Rowan, she effaced all evidences that
there had ever been a love affair between them. They resumed their
social relations temporarily and for a definite pur