t will only worry her unnecessarily."

"Of course not," said Mrs. Westmore.

CHAPTER X

A STAR AND A SATELLITE

An hour later Mrs. Westmore had gone to her room and Alice had been
singing his favorite songs. Her singing always had a peculiar
influence over Richard Travis--a moral influence, which, perhaps, was
the secret of its power; and all influence which is permanent is
moral. There was in it for him an uplifting force that he never
experienced save in her presence and under the influence of her
songs.

He was a brilliant man and he knew that if he won Alice Westmore it
must be done on a high plane. Women were his playthings--he had won
them by the score and flung them away when won. But all his
life--even when a boy--he had dreamed of finally winning Alice
Westmore and settling down.

Like all men who were impure, he made the mistake of thinking that
one day, when he wished, he could be pure.

Such a man may marry, but it is a thing of convenience, a matter in
which he selects some woman, who he knows will not be his mistress,
to become his housekeeper.

And thus she plods along in life, differing eventually only from his
mistress in that she is the mother of his children.

In all Richard's longings, too, for Alice Westmore, there was an
unconscious cause. He did not know it because he could not know.

Sooner or later love, which is loose, surfeits and sours. It is then
that it turns instinctively to the pure, as the Jews, straying from
their true God and meeting the chastisement of the sword of Babylon,
turned in their anguish to the city of their King.

Nature is inexorable, and love has its laws as fixed as those which
hold the stars in their course. And woe to the man or woman who
transgresses! He who, ere it is ripe, deflowers the bud of blossoming
love in wantonness and waste, in after years will watch and wait and
water it with tears, in vain, for that bloom will never come.

She came over by the fire. Her face was flushed; her beautiful sad
eyes lighted with excitement.

"Do you remember the first time I ever heard you sing, Alice?"

His voice was earnest and full of pathos, for him.

"Was it not when father dressed me as a gypsy girl and I rode my pony
over to The Gaffs and sang from horse-back for your grandfather?"

He nodded: "I thought you were the prettiest thing I ever saw, and I
have thought so ever since. That's when I fell in love with you."

"I remember quite distinc