blame yourself
for that which it was never in your power to prevent or remedy. A
man--this man--has no business to cast on you the blight of his own
weakness and folly, to establish a relation of cause and effect between
your refusal of him and the subsequent transformation of a gentleman
into a common drunkard."

"John!"

"Ah, don't think me bitter, dearest! If the man you saw was actually
Cavendish, I pity him from the bottom of my heart. But it was his hands
which built up the barrier between his life and ours, and it must be his
that tear it down. It is intolerable that in his degradation he should
come into your life again, and have, even in your imagination, the
smallest claim upon you--intolerable! The paths of my love for you and
my duty toward you are identical in this respect. There can be no
alternative--no quibbling. At least until he has redeemed himself, if
redemption is still possible, the thought of him, his presence, his
misdoings, must not and shall not contaminate the atmosphere in which
you live and move."

Natalie had risen suddenly, her eyes ablaze.

"Ah, John!" she said. "Am I then a toy, a sugar figure, that I must be
packed in cotton, and shielded from all knowledge of the evil in the
world? Is that what it means to be a woman? Ah, _no_! It is bad enough
to be hemmed in by the wretched conventionalities which prevent my doing
openly what I conceive to be my duty, without adding to the restrictions
that actually exist the imaginary one that I must not even think of the
misery, the wretchedness, the sordid vice which abound just across the
borders of the comfortable little world in which I live. And see, boy
dear!--with all the force of my conviction that things should be
otherwise, yet I am reasonable. I don't ask to see Spencer, or to have
an active hand in his redemption. I realize that the time for that has
passed, and that you are just in saying that he must come to me, not I
to him--and come to me another than the man he is to-day. Anything else
is impossible: that I see and accept. But the hideous fact remains. A
man who loved me once, who offered me all that a man can offer a woman,
is walking the streets of Kenton City, cold, hungry, homeless--a
beggar! What business is it of yours or mine what his past follies and
weaknesses were? His temptations may have been beyond our understanding,
but his present plight is not. He is begging--begging at our very
doors--a man whom we have called