't you want him to?" her mother asked, stricken a little at sight
of her agitation.

"Yes, I wanted him to, but that doesn't make it any easier. It makes it
harder. Momma!"

"Well, Ellen?"

"You know you've got to tell him, first."

"Tell him?" Mrs. Kenton repeated, but she knew what Ellen meant.

"About--Mr. Bittridge. All about it. Every single thing. About his
kissing me that night."

At the last demand Mrs. Kenton was visibly shaken in her invisible
assent to the girl's wish. "Don't you think, Ellen, that you had better
tell him that--some time?"

"No, now. And you must tell him. You let me go to the theatre with him."
The faintest shadow of resentment clouded the girl's face, but still
Mrs. Kenton, thought she knew her own guilt, could not yield.

"Why, Ellen," she pleaded, not without a reproachful sense of vulgarity
in such a plea, "don't you suppose HE ever--kissed any one?"

"That doesn't concern me, momma," said Ellen, without a trace of
consciousness that she was saying anything uncommon. "If you won't tell
him, then that ends it. I won't see him."

"Oh, well!" her mother sighed. "I will try to tell him. But I'd rather
be whipped. I know he'll laugh at me."

"He won't laugh at you," said the girl, confidently, almost
comfortingly. "I want him to know everything before I meet him. I
don't want to have a single thing on my mind. I don't want to think of
myself!"

Mrs. Kenton understood the woman--soul that spoke in these words.
"Well," she said, with a deep, long breath, "be ready, then."

But she felt the burden which had been put upon her to be so much more
than she could bear that when she found her husband in their parlor she
instantly resolved to cast it upon him. He stood at the window with his
hat on.

"Has Breckon been here yet?" he asked.

"Have you seen him yet?" she returned.

"Yes, and I thought he was coming right here. But perhaps he stopped to
screw his courage up. He only knew how little it needed with us!"

"Well, now, it's we who've got to have the courage. Or you have. Do
you know what Ellen wants to have done?" Mrs. Kenton put it in these
impersonal terms, and as a preliminary to shirking her share of the
burden.

"She doesn't want to have him refused?"

"She wants to have him told all about Bittridge."

After a momentary revolt the judge said, "Well, that's right. It's like
Ellen."

"There's something else that's more like her," said Mrs. Kenton,
indignantly. "S