t I am
working for you.

"ZOE LE BARON."

That was all. Just a girlish, constrained letter, hardly hinting at the
hot tears that had been shed for many weary nights, coyly telling of the
impatient young love and all the maidenly shame.

David permitted himself to read it only once. Then a sudden resolution
was born-a heroic one. Before he got the letter he was a crushed
and unsophisticated boy; when he had read it, and absorbed its full
significance, he became suddenly a man, capable of a great sacrifice.

"I return your letter," he wrote, without superscription, "and thank you
for your anxiety about me. But the truth is, I had forgotten all about
you in my trouble. You were not in the least to blame for what happened.
I might have known I would come to such an end. You thought I was good,
of course; but it is not easy to find out the life of a young man. It is
rather mortifying to have a private letter sent here, because the warden
reads them all. I hope you will enjoy yourself this winter, and hasten
to forget one who had certainly forgotten you till reminded by your
letter, which I return.

"Respectfully,

"DAVID CULROSS."

That night some deep lines came into his face which never left it, and
which made him look like a man of middle age.

He never doubted that his plan would succeed; that, piqued and indignant
at his ingratitude, she would hate him, and in a little time forget
he ever lived, or remember him only to blush with shame at her past
association with him. He saw her happy, loved, living the usual life of
women, with all those things that make life rich.

For there in the solitude an understanding of deep things came to him.
He who thought never to have a wife grew to know what the joy of it must
be. He perceived all the subtle rapture of wedded souls. He learned what
the love of children was, the pride of home, the unselfish ambition
for success that spurs men on. All the emotions passed in procession at
night before him, tricked out in palpable forms.

A burst of girlish tears would dissipate whatever lingering pity Zoe
felt for him. How often he said that! With her sensitiveness she would
be sure to hate a man who had mortified her.

So he fell to dreaming of her again as moving among happy and luxurious
scenes, exquisitely clothed, with flowers on her bosom and jewels on
her neck; and he saw men loving her, and was glad, and saw her at last
loving the best of them, and told himself in