the world held for the other. So her possessorship of Keith was a thing
which--again in the dark and brooding hours of night--sometimes made
him writhe in an agony of shame. Hers was a shameless love, a love
which had not even the lover's reason for embarrassment, a love
unreserved and open as the day. It was her trick, nights, to nestle
herself in the big armchair with him, and it was her fun to smother his
face in her hair and tumble it about him, piling it over his mouth and
nose until she made him plead for air. Again she would fit herself
comfortably in the hollow of his arm and sit the evening out with her
head on his shoulder, while they planned their future, and twice in
that week she fell asleep there. Each morning she greeted him with a
kiss, and each night she came to him to be kissed, and when it was her
pleasure she kissed him--or made him kiss her--when they were on their
long walks. It was bitter-sweet to Keith, and more frequently came the
hours of crushing desolation for him, those hours in the still, dark
night when his hypocrisy and his crime stood out stark and hideous in
his troubled brain.

As this thing grew in him, a black and foreboding thunderstorm on the
horizon of his dreams, an impulse which he did not resist dragged him
more and more frequently down to the old home, and Mary Josephine was
always with him. They let no one know of these visits. And they talked
about John Keith, and in Mary Josephine's eyes he saw more than once a
soft and starry glow of understanding. She loved the memory of this man
because he, her brother, had loved him. And after these hours came the
nights when truth, smiling at him, flung aside its mask and stood a
grinning specter, and he measured to the depths the falseness of his
triumph. His comfort was the thought that she knew. Whatever happened,
she would know what John Keith had been. For he, John Keith, had told
her. So much of the truth had he lived.

He fought against the new strain that was descending upon him slowly
and steadily as the days passed. He could not but see the new light
that had grown in Miriam Kirkstone's eyes. At times it was more than a
dawn of hope. It was almost certainty. She had faith in him, faith in
his promise to her, in his power to fight, his strength to win. Her
growing friendship with Mary Josephine accentuated this, inspiring her
at times almost to a point of conviction, for Mary Josephine's
confidence in him was a passion. Even