the undoubted courage and consciousness of strength shown in
this wild but single-handed crusade against wealth and power; rather,
perhaps, it seemed to her to condone her own weakness in her youthful
and inexplicable passion for him. No wonder she had submitted.

"Then you have nothing more to tell me?" she said after a pause, rising
and going towards the mantel.

"You needn't light up for me," he returned, rising also. "I am going.
Unless," he added, with his coarse laugh, "you think it wouldn't look
well for Mrs. Horncastle to have been sitting in the dark with--a
stranger!" He paused as she contemptuously put down the candlestick and
threw the unlit match into the grate. "No, I've nothing more to tell.
He's a fancy-looking pup. You'd take him for twenty-one, though he's
only sixteen--clean-limbed and perfect--but for one thing"--He stopped.
He met her quick look of interrogation, however, with a lowering silence
that, nevertheless, changed again as he surveyed her erect figure by
the faint light of the window with a sardonic smile. "He favors you, I
think, and in all but one thing, too."

"And that?" she queried coldly, as he seemed to hesitate.

"He ain't ashamed of ME," he returned, with a laugh.

The door closed behind him; she heard his heavy step descend the
creaking stairs; he was gone. She went to the window and threw it
open, as if to get rid of the atmosphere charged with his presence,--a
presence still so potent that she now knew that for the last five
minutes she had been, to her horror, struggling against its magnetism.
She even recoiled now at the thought of her child, as if, in these new
confidences over it, it had revived the old intimacy in this link
of their common flesh. She looked down from her window on the square
shoulders, thick throat, and crisp matted hair of her husband as he
vanished in the darkness, and drew a breath of freedom,--a freedom not
so much from him as from her own weakness that he was bearing away with
him into the exonerating night.

She shut the window and sank down in her chair again, but in the
encompassing and compassionate obscurity of the room. And this was the
man she had loved and for whom she had wrecked her young life! Or WAS
it love? and, if NOT, how was she better than he? Worse; for he was
more loyal to that passion that had brought them together and its
responsibilities than she was. She had suffered the perils and pangs of
maternity, and yet had only the m