for all women who
were mothers.

"This income could have set John free too, if he would only have thought
it over," she said to herself. "He need not have been burdened with us
while he was getting his depths in the business world," she concluded.

Wherever Elizabeth's thoughts turned to-day, John was the centre of them.
Elizabeth had never been resentful toward her husband, and the
never-ceasing cause of speculation and comment in the neighbourhood had
been upon the fact that though she lived apart from him, she never seemed
to think of divorce. Elizabeth's attitude toward John was that of a mother
who waits for a child to find the real light on a situation. She rarely
heard from him, and never directly. She knew of some of his affairs
through Doctor Morgan, with whom John corresponded when business required,
but she wrote regularly to Mrs. Hunter, who had gone to her son the second
year he had been away, and who had written to her at that time. Elizabeth
had been glad of so simple a means of keeping the link unbroken between
him and his child. It had been no part of her plan to separate Jack from
his father. She would not ask John to return, but she wished him to have
such knowledge of his son as his temper would permit. She wrote such
details of the home and the child as would interest them, knowing that
John would read the letters. Somehow, to-day she wished that she could
write to him direct, but as she thought she shook her head.

"It cannot be," she said aloud.

"Mamma, if you don't come we won't have time to go for the mail," Jack
called.

The pleasant afternoon had waned; Elizabeth Hunter gazed about her in
astonishment; it was indeed late.

She stooped and passed her hand over the name cut in the marble slab.
"Hugh Noland, aged twenty-nine."

"Hugh Noland, dear," she said aloud, "you have set me financially free,
but there is another kind of freedom I have got to win for myself. I've
got to tell John the things that we wanted to tell and were too cowardly
to do. If we ever come together again I shall tell it out, if all this
country gets to hear it. Jack can better afford to take the disgrace of it
than to have a mother who carries it about with her as a secret. Without
honesty no other virtue is a virtue at all."

Elizabeth's eyes were full of tears as she voiced her vow, but there was a
sense of relief welling up within her that she had not known in all the
five years Hugh had lain here. She stood v