honorable again."

"That," he said, in a hard voice, "is beyond your power."

She showed no disposition to contradict him, or even to maintain the
conversation. Presently he went on:--

"I cannot let you injure your foundation by--branding it with his
notoriety, in an impulsive and--and fruitless generosity. For it would
be fruitless. You, of all people, must understand that the burden on
the other side is--impossibly heavy. You know that, don't you?"

She raised her head and looked at him.

Again, her pride had been plucking at her heartstrings, burning her with
the remembrance that he, when he gave her everything that a man could
give, had done it in a manner perfect and without flaw. And now she,
with her infinitely smaller offering, sat tongue-tied and ineffectual,
unable to give with a show of the purple, too poor-spirited even to
yield him the truth for his truth which alone made the gift worth the
offering.

Her blood, her spirit, and all her inheritance rallied at the call of
her pride. She looked at him, and made her gaze be steady: though this
seemed to her the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.

"I must not let you think that I wanted to do this only for your
father's sake. That would not be honest. Part of my pleasure in planning
it--most of it, perhaps--was because I--I should so much like to do
something for your father's son."

She rose, trying to give the movement a casual air, and went over to her
little desk, pretending to busy herself straightening out the litter of
papers upon it. From this safe distance, her back toward him, she forced
herself to add:--

"This reformatory will take the place of the one you--would have won for
us. Don't you see? Half-my happiness in giving it is gone, unless you
will lend me the name."

Behind her the silence was impenetrable.

She stood at her desk, methodically sorting papers which she did not
see, and wildly guessing at the meaning of that look of turbulent
consciousness which she had seen break startled into his eyes. More even
than in their last meeting, she had found that the sight of his face,
wonderfully changed yet even more wonderfully the same, deeply affected
her to-day. Its new sadness and premature age moved her strangely; with
a peculiar stab of compassion and pain she had seen for the first time
the gray in the nondescript hair about his temples. For his face, she
had seen that the smooth sheath of satisfied self-absorption, whi