not have forfeited them for the world. They soon
became all that gave significance to her existence, and to them she
determined that her life should be devoted. To stand well with this
boy, to be loved, admired and respected by him, to be to him all that a
mother could be, to be guided by his pure and tender conscience toward
her own reformation, to waken into something like life and nourish into
something like strength the starved motherhood within her--these became
her dominant motives.

Mr. Belcher saw the change in her, but was too gross in his nature, too
blind in his passion, and too vain in his imagined power, to comprehend
it. She was a woman, and had her whims, he thought. Whims were
evanescent, and this particular whim would pass away. He was vexed by
seeing the boy so constantly with her. He met them walking together in
the street, or straying in the park, hand in hand, or caught the lad
looking at him from her window. He could not doubt that all this
intimacy was approved by Mr. Balfour. Was she playing a deep game? Could
she play it for anybody but himself--the man who had taken her heart by
storm? Her actions, however, even when interpreted by his self-conceit,
gave him uneasiness. She had grown to be very kind and considerate
toward Mrs. Belcher. Had this friendship moved her to crush the passion
for her husband? Ah! if she could only know how true he was to her in
his untruthfulness!--how faithful he was to her in his perjury!--how he
had saved himself for the ever-vanishing opportunity!

Many a time the old self-pity came back to the successful scoundrel.
Many a time he wondered why the fate which had been so kind to him in
other things would not open the door to his wishes in this. With this
unrewarded passion gnawing at his heart, and with the necessity of
treating the wife of his youth with constantly increasing consideration,
in order to cover it from her sight, the General was anything but a
satisfied and happy man. The more he thought upon it, the more morbid he
grew, until it seemed to him that his wife must look through his
hypocritical eyes into his guilty heart. He grew more and more guarded
in his speech. If he mentioned Mrs. Dillingham's name, he always did it
incidentally, and then only for the purpose of showing that he had no
reason to avoid the mention of it.

There was another thought that preyed upon him. He was consciously a
forger. He had not used the document he had forged, but he