hard. What if
she were to go to Father Honore and tell him something of her trouble?
Would it help? Would it ease the intolerable pain at her heart, lessen
the load on her mind?

She dared not answer, dared not think about it. Involuntarily she
started forward at a quick pace towards the stone house over by the
pines--a distance of a quarter of a mile.

The sun was nearing the rim of the Flamsted Hills. Far beyond them, the
mighty shoulder of Katahdin, mantled with white, caught the red gleam
and lent to the deep blue of the northern heavens a faint rose
reflection of the setting sun. The children, just from school, were
shouting at their rough play--snow-balling, sledding, skating and
tobogganning on that portion of the pond which had been cleared of snow.
The great derricks on the ledges creaked and groaned as the remaining
men made all fast for the night; like a gigantic cobweb their supporting
wires stretched thick, enmeshed, and finely dark over the white expanse
of the quarries. From the power-house a column of steam rose straight
and steady into the windless air.

Hurrying on, Aileen looked upon it with set lips and a hardening heart.
She had come to hate, almost, the sight of this life of free toil for
the sake of love and home.

It was a woman who was thinking these thoughts in her rapid walk to the
priest's house--a woman of twenty-six who for more than seven years had
suffered in silence; suffered over and over again the humiliation that
had been put upon her womanhood; who, despite that humiliation, could
not divest herself of the idea that she still clung to her girlhood's
love for the man who had humiliated her. She told herself again and
again that she was idealizing that first feeling for him, instead of
accepting the fact that, as a woman, she would be incapable, if the
circumstances were to repeat themselves now, of experiencing it.

Since that fateful night in The Gore, Champney Googe's name had never
voluntarily passed her lips. So far as she knew, no one so much as
suspected that she was a factor in his escape--for Luigi had kept her
secret. Sometimes when she felt, rather than saw, Father Honore's eyes
fixed upon her in troubled questioning, the blood would rush to her
cheeks and she could but wonder in dumb misery if Champney had told him
anything concerning her during those ten days in New York.

For six years there had been a veil, as it were, drawn between the
lovely relations that had