ell-developed personality, having
gained, with all its other attainments, a power of self-concealment from
the inquisitive eye?

The brow, low and broad, bespoke gracious womanhood and a possible
radiant maternity, rather than intellectuality. The masses of hair were
braided and wound coronet-style about the small uplifted head. The eyes,
deep, dark, and mystical gave no clue to the inner woman; but the mouth,
while it was tender in its curves, had a rigidity of purpose in its
expression that fixed the attention. A pretty, rounded chin, a slender,
slightly tilted nose, an exquisite throat set off by the cloud of
lace--such was the face that Gaston beheld, and presently it wrung a
groan from him.

"Ruth, Ruth, Ruth," he muttered, and then his mind took to the
memory-haunted highway that led back, back of the lonely years of St.
Ange; past a certain black horror that had stood, and would always
stand, as a thing that should not have existed; but which had been, and
would always remain, an object that cast a shadow before it and behind
it.

"Did you do this thing?"

"I did."

Question and answer made up the vital happening in Gaston's life.
Everything before led up to them, and all that had occurred since was
the outcome.

They had admitted--or so he once thought--of no shading nor explanation.
The questioner was not the type to deal unsteadily with a problem, and
Gaston had been too simple and direct to note fine points or shadings.
Perhaps neither of them had understood. Life had been so fair until the
terrible thing had loomed up. It had come like a cataclysm--how could
they, young and inexperienced as they had been, deal with the situation
justly?

Suppose _now_ she stood before him, wonder-eyes raised, seeking his
soul's truth; hands resting in his until he should speak. Would he speak
again those two crude, fatal words? Would she drop her hands letting his
soul sink, by so doing, into the blackness which had engulfed it?

That was the torturing problem that Gaston was working out up in the
lonely St. Ange woods; but he seemed no nearer the answer than when he
had come to the place, by mistake, a few years back, and decided to stay
there simply because it was as desirable as any other forsaken spot,
while he was debarred from the Paradise of life.

The lamp flickered fretfully, and the spasmodic flare showed the rigid
face torn with the emotions that were racking the soul laid bare before
its God and its