different from the stately dining-room of the
old colonial mansion where he now lived; but it was homelike, and it
was familiar. The sight of it moved his heart, and he felt for the
moment a sort of a blind anger against the fate which made it necessary
that he should visit the home of his childhood, if at all, like a thief
in the night. But he realized, after a moment, that the thought was
pure sentiment, and that one who had gained so much ought not to
complain if he must give up a little. He who would climb the heights
of life must leave even the pleasantest valleys behind.

"Rena," asked her mother, "how'd you like to go an' pay yo'r brother
John a visit? I guess I might spare you for a little while."

The girl's eyes lighted up. She would not have gone if her mother had
wished her to stay, but she would always have regarded this as the lost
opportunity of her life.

"Are you sure you don't care, mamma?" she asked, hoping and yet
doubting.

"Oh, I'll manage to git along somehow or other. You can go an' stay
till you git homesick, an' then John'll let you come back home."

But Mis' Molly believed that she would never come back, except, like
her brother, under cover of the night. She must lose her daughter as
well as her son, and this should be the penance for her sin. That her
children must expiate as well the sins of their fathers, who had sinned
so lightly, after the manner of men, neither she nor they could
foresee, since they could not read the future.

The next boat by which Warwick could take his sister away left early in
the morning of the next day but one. He went back to his hotel with
the understanding that the morrow should be devoted to getting Rena
ready for her departure, and that Warwick would visit the household
again the following evening; for, as has been intimated, there were
several reasons why there should be no open relations between the fine
gentleman at the hotel and the women in the house behind the cedars,
who, while superior in blood and breeding to the people of the
neighborhood in which they lived, were yet under the shadow of some
cloud which clearly shut them out from the better society of the town.
Almost any resident could have given one or more of these reasons, of
which any one would have been sufficient to most of them; and to some
of them Warwick's mere presence in the town would have seemed a bold
and daring thing.

III

THE OLD JUDGE

On the morning follow