wn
opportunity for other sins than her first one, she held her peace. Human
nature were here as it is elsewhere--women as keen; men as lewd. But the
triumph of Aurora Lane might now have been called complete. She had
"lived it down."

This long and terrible battle of one woman against so many strangely
enough had not wholly embittered her life, so strong and sweet and true
and normal had it originally been. She still could smile--smile in two
fashions. One was a pleasant, sunny and open smile for those who came in
the surface affairs of life. The other was deeper, a slow, wry smile,
very wise, and yet perhaps charitable, after all. Aurora Lane knew!

But all these years she had worked on with but one purpose--to bring up
her boy and to keep her boy in ignorance of his birth. He had never
known--not in all these years! It had been her dream, her prayer, that
he might never know.

And now he knew--he must know.

They stepped through the little picket gate, up the tiny brick walk and
across the little narrow porch together, into the tiny apartments which
had been the arena for Aurora Lane--in which she had fought for her own
life, her own soul, and for the life of her son, her tribute to the
scheme of life itself. Here lay the _penetralia_ of this domicile, this
weak fortification against the world.

In this room were odds and ends of furniture, a few pictures not
ill-chosen--pictures not in crude colors, but good blacks and whites.
Woman or girl, Aurora Lane had had her own longings for the great
things, the beautiful things of life, for the wide world which she never
was to see. Her taste for good things was instinctive, perhaps
hereditary. Had she herself not been an orphan, perhaps she had not
dared the attempt to orphan her own son. There were books and magazines
upon the table, mixed in with odds and ends of scraps of work sometimes
brought hither; the margin between her personal and her professional
life being a very vague matter.

Back of this central room, through the open door, showed the small white
bed in the tiny sleeping room. At the side of this was the yet more tiny
kitchen where Aurora Lane all these years had cooked for herself and
washed for herself and drawn wood and water for herself. She had no
servant, or at least usually had not. Daily she wrought a woman's
miracles in economy. Year by year she had, in some inscrutable fashion,
been able to keep up appearances, and to pay her bills, and to se