edars, where she had been brought into the world without her own
knowledge or consent, and had first drawn the breath of life by the
involuntary contraction of certain muscles, Rena had learned, in a
short time, many things; but she was yet to learn that the innocent
suffer with the guilty, and feel the punishment the more keenly because
unmerited. She had yet to learn that the old Mosaic formula, "The sins
of the fathers shall be visited upon the children," was graven more
indelibly upon the heart of the race than upon the tables of Sinai.

But would her lover still love her, if he knew all? She had read some
of the novels in the bookcase in her mother's hall, and others at
boarding-school. She had read that love was a conqueror, that neither
life nor death, nor creed nor caste, could stay his triumphant course.
Her secret was no legal bar to their union. If Rena could forget the
secret, and Tryon should never know it, it would be no obstacle to
their happiness. But Rena felt, with a sinking of the heart, that
happiness was not a matter of law or of fact, but lay entirely within
the domain of sentiment. We are happy when we think ourselves happy,
and with a strange perversity we often differ from others with regard
to what should constitute our happiness. Rena's secret was the worm in
the bud, the skeleton in the closet.

"He says that he loves me. He DOES love me. Would he love me, if he
knew?" She stood before an oval mirror brought from France by one of
Warwick's wife's ancestors, and regarded her image with a coldly
critical eye. She was as little vain as any of her sex who are endowed
with beauty. She tried to place herself, in thus passing upon her own
claims to consideration, in the hostile attitude of society toward her
hidden disability. There was no mark upon her brow to brand her as
less pure, less innocent, less desirable, less worthy to be loved, than
these proud women of the past who had admired themselves in this old
mirror.

"I think a man might love me for myself," she murmured pathetically,
"and if he loved me truly, that he would marry me. If he would not
marry me, then it would be because he didn't love me. I'll tell George
my secret. If he leaves me, then he does not love me."

But this resolution vanished into thin air before it was fully
formulated. The secret was not hers alone; it involved her brother's
position, to whom she owed everything, and in less degree the future of
he