e of folly that
wrecked a girl's life sixteen years ago. If the sins of a man's youth
were to shadow his whole life, then charity and regeneration must be
cast out of the scheme of things. Moreover, Bower's version of the
incident might put a new face on it. There was no knowing how he too
had been tempted and suffered. That he raged against the resurrection
of a bygone misdeed was shown by his mad impulse to kill Stampa on the
glacier. That such a man, strong in the power of his wealth and social
position, should even dream of blotting out the past by a crime,
offered the clearest proof of the frenzy that possessed him as soon as
he recognized Etta Stampa's father.

Not one word of his personal belief crossed Spencer's lips during the
talk with the guide. Rather did he impress on his angry and vengeful
hearer that a forgotten scandal should be left in its tomb. He took
this line, not that he posed as a moralist, but because he hated to
acknowledge, even to himself, that he was helped in his wooing by
Helen's horror of his rival's lapse from the standard every pure
minded woman sets up in her ideal lover. Ethically, he might be wrong;
in his conscience he was justified. He had suffered too grievously
from every species of intrigue and calumny during his own career not
to be ultra-sensitive in regard to the use of such agents.

Yet, watching the bent and crippled old man waiting there in the snow,
a sense of pity and mourning chilled his heart with ice cold touch.

"If I were Stampa's son, if that dead girl were my sister, how would
_I_ settle with Bower?" he asked, clenching his pipe firmly between
his teeth. "Well, I could only ask God to be merciful both to him and
to me."

"Good gracious, Mr. Spencer! why that fierce gaze at our delightful
valley?" came the voice of Mrs. de la Vere. "I am glad none of us can
give you the address of the Swiss clerk of the weather--or you would
surely slay him."

He turned. Convention demanded a smile and a polite greeting; but
Spencer was not conventional. "You are a thought reader, Mrs. de la
Vere," he said.

"'One of my many attractions,' you should have added."

"I find this limpid light too critical."

"Oh, what a horrid thing to tell any woman, especially in the early
morning!"

"I have a wretched habit of putting the second part of a sentence
first. I really intended to say--but it is too late."

"It is rather like swallowing the sugar coating after the pill; but
I