ive a lie, to pretend to keep her
vows to love and honor him? Would it be right to condemn Gardiner to
be poisoned by such a father?' And at last I saw the truth, and your
mother agreed with me. We had been too narrow. We had been laying
down our own notions as God's great justice."

Pauline drew away from her father so that she could look at him. And at
last she saw into his heart. "If I had only known," she said, and sat
numb and stunned.

"When you were coming home from college," her father went on, "your
mother and I talked over what we should do. John had just confessed
your secret marriage--"

"You knew that!"

"Yes, and we understood, Polly. You were so young--so headstrong--and
you couldn't appreciate our reasons."

Pauline's brain was reeling.

"Your mother and I talked it over before you got home and thought it
best to leave you entirely free to choose. But when we saw you
overcome by joy--"

"Don't!" she interrupted, her voice a cry of pain. "I can't bear it!
Don't!" Years of false self-sacrifice, of deceiving her parents and
her child, of self-suppression and self-degradation, and this final
cruelty to Gladys--all, all in vain, all a heaping of folly upon folly,
of wrong upon wrong.

She rushed toward the house. She must fly somewhere--anywhere--to
escape the thoughts that were picking with sharp beaks at her aching
heart. Half-way up the walk she turned and fled to a refuge she would
not have thought of half an hour before to her father's arms.

"Oh, father," she cried. "If I had only known you!"

Gladys, returning from her walk, went directly to Pauline's
sitting-room.

"I'm off for New York and Europe to-morrow morning," she began
abruptly, her voice hard, her expression bitter and reckless.

"Where can she have heard about Leonora?" thought Pauline. She said in
a strained voice: "I had hoped you would stay here to look after the
house."

"To look after the house? What do you mean?" asked Gladys. But she was
too full of herself to be interested in the answer, and went on: "I
want you to forget what I said to you. I've got over all that. I've
come to my senses."

Pauline began a nervous turning of her rings.

Gladys gave a short, grim laugh. "I detest him," she went on. "We're
very changeable, we women, aren't we? I went out of this house two
hours ago loving him--to distraction. I came back hating him. And all
that has happened in between is that I met him and