e filled her mind, and she
had challenged him so. But yet, what right had she to sacrifice this man
she loved to the perverted criminal who had spoiled her youth and taken
away from her every dear illusion of her life and heart? By every right
of justice and humanity she was no more the wife of Henry Meydon than if
she had never seen him. He had forfeited every claim upon her, dragged
in the mire her unspotted life--unspotted, for in all temptation, in her
defenceless position, she had kept the whole commandment; she had, while
at the mercy of her own temperament, fought her way through all, with
a weeping heart and laughing lips. Had she not longed for a little
home with a great love, and a strong, true man? Ah, it had been lonely,
bitterly lonely! Yet she had remained true to the scoundrel, from whom
she could not free herself without putting him in the grasp of the law
to atone for his crime. She was punished for his crimes; she was
denied the exercise of her womanhood in order to shield him. Still she
remembered that once she had loved him, those years ago, when he first
won her heart from those so much better than he, who loved her so much
more honestly; and this memory had helped her in a way. She had tried to
be true to it, that dead, lost thing, of which this man who came once a
year to see her, and now, lying with his life at stake in the hospital,
was the repellent ghost.

"Ah, you will not see him die?" she urged.

"It seems to move you greatly what happens to this man," he said, his
determined dark eyes searching hers, for she baffled him. If she could
feel so much for a "casual," why not a little more feeling for him?
Suddenly, as he drew her eyes to him again, there came the conviction
that they were full of feeling for him. They were sending a message,
an appealing, passionate message, which told him more than he had ever
heard from her or seen in her face before. Yes, she was his! Without a
spoken word she had told him so. What, then, held her back? But women
were a race by themselves, and he knew that he must wait till she chose
to have him know what she had unintentionally conveyed but now.

"Yes, I am moved," she continued slowly. "Who can tell what this man
might do with his life, if it is saved! Don't you think of that? It
isn't the importance of a life that's at stake; it's the importance of
living; and we do not live alone, do we?"

His mind was made up. "I will not, cannot promise anything til