cter.
"No wonder I love you--there never was anybody so brave and so true as
you. But you must help me. I must see you and talk to you--once in a
while, anyhow."

Pauline flushed painfully.

"Not till--they--let me--or I'm older, John. They've always trusted me
and left me free. And I can't deceive them."

He liked this--it was another proof that she was, through and through,
the sort of woman who was worthy to be his wife.

"Well--we'll wait," he said. "And if they won't be fair to us, why,
we'll have a right to do the best we can." He gave her a tragic look.

"I've set my heart on you, Polly, and I never can stand it not to get
what I've set my heart on. If I lost you, I'd go straight to ruin."

She might have been a great deal older and wiser and still not have
seen in this a confirmation of her father's judgment of her lover. And
her parents had unconsciously driven her into a mental state in which,
if he had committed a crime, it would have seemed to her their fault
rather than his. The next day she opened the subject with her
mother--the subject that was never out of their minds.

"I can't forget him, mother. I CAN'T give him up." With the splendid
confidence of youth, "I can save him--he'll do anything for my sake."
With the touching ignorance of youth, "He's done nothing so very
dreadful, I'm sure--I'd believe him against the whole world."

And in the evening her mother approached her father. She was in
sympathy with Pauline, though her loyalty to her husband made her
careful not to show it. She had small confidence in a man's judgments
of men on their woman-side, great confidence in the power of women to
change and uplift men.

"Father," said she, when they were alone on the side porch after
supper, "have you noticed how hard Polly is taking IT?"

His eyes and the sudden deepening of the lines in his face answered her.

"Don't you think maybe we've been a little--too--severe?"

"I've tried to think so, but--" He shook his head. "Maggie, he's
hopeless, hopeless."

"I don't know much about those things." This was a mere form of
speech. She thought she knew all there was to be known; and as she was
an intelligent woman who had lived a long time and had a normal human
curiosity she did know a great deal. But, after the fashion of many of
the women of the older generation, she had left undisturbed his
delusion that her goodness was the result not of intelligence but of
ignorance. "B