een able to give
particulars of Sally's departure, and to say that she and Mr. Fenwick
had gone out separately, Rosalind would have felt less at ease about
him; but nothing transpired to show that they had not gone out
together. Mrs. Lobjoit's data were all based on the fact that she
found the street door open when she went to do down her step, and she
had finished this job and gone back into the kitchen by the time Sally
followed Fenwick out. Of course, she never came upstairs to see what
rooms were empty; why should she? And as no reason for inquiry
presented itself, the question was never raised by Rosalind. Sally
was naturally an earlier bird than herself, and quite as often as
not she would join Gerry in his walk before breakfast.

How thankful she felt, now that the revelation was over, that Sally
was within reach to help in calming down the mind that had been so
terribly shaken by it; for all her thoughts were of Gerry; on her
own behalf she felt nothing but contentment. Think what her daily
existence had been! What had she to lose by a complete removal of
the darkness that had shrouded her husband's early life with her--or
rather, what had she not to gain? Now that it had been assured to her
that nothing in the past could make a new rift between them, the only
weight upon her mind was the possible necessity for revealing to Sally
in the end the story of her parentage. What mother, to whom a like
story of her own early days was neither more nor less than a glimpse
into Hell, could have felt otherwise about communicating it to her
child? She felt, too, the old feeling of the difficulty there would be
in making Sally understand. The girl had not chanced across devildom
enough to make her an easy recipient of such a tale.

Oh, the pleasure with which she recalled his last words of the night
before: "She is _my_ daughter now!" It was the final ratification of
the protest of her life against the "rights" that Law and Usage grant
to technical paternity; rights that can only be abrogated or ignored
by a child's actual parent--its mother--at the cost of insult and
contumely from a world that worships its own folly and ignores its own
gods. Sally was hers--her own--hard as the terms of her possession had
been, and she had assigned a moiety of her rights in her to the man
she loved. What was the fatherhood of blood alone to set against
the one her motherhood had a right to concede, and had conceded, in
response to the sp