light inside the coach and he opened his
eyes. . . ."

She did not relate that the child had awaked in her arms.

"It was the first thing Dicky told me," she repeated; "and the only
thing about--her. I think it must be the only thing he knows about
her."

"Probably; for she died when he was born and--well, as the child grew
up, it was not easy to explain to him. Other folks, no doubt--the
servants and suchlike--were either afraid to tell or left it to me as my
business. And I am an indolent parent." He paused and added,
"To be quite honest, I dare say I distasted the job and shirked it."

"You did wrongly then," murmured Ruth, and her eyes were moist.
"Dicky started with a great hole in his life, and you left it unfilled.
Often, being lonely, he must have needed to know something of his
mother. You should have told him all that was good; and that was not
little, I think, if you had loved her?"

"I loved her to folly," he answered at length, his eyes still fixed on
the mare's shoulder; "and yet not to folly, for she was a good woman: a
married woman, some three or four years older than I and close upon
twenty years younger than her husband, who was major of my regiment."

"You ran away with her? . . . Say that he was not your friend."

"He was not; and you may put it more correctly that I helped her to run
away from him. He was a drunkard, and in private he ill-used her
disgustingly. . . . Having helped her to escape I offered him his
satisfaction. He refused to divorce her; but we fought and I ran him
through the arm to avoid running him through the body, for he was a
shockingly bad swordsman."

Ruth frowned. "You could not marry her?"

"No, and to kill him was no remedy; for if I could not marry an
undivorced woman, as little could she have married her husband's
murderer." He hunched his shoulders and concluded, "The dilemma is not
unusual."

"What happened, then?"

"My mother paid twenty calls upon the Duke of Newcastle, and after the
twentieth I received the Collectorship of this port of Boston.
It was exile, but lucrative exile. My good mother is a Whig and devout;
and there is nothing like that combination for making the best of both
worlds. Indeed you may say that at this point she added the New World,
and made the best of all three. She assured me that its solitudes would
offer, among other advantages, great opportunity for repentance.
'Of course,' she said, 'if you must take the woman,