ed with tears as she looked at
him.

"Why did you do this?" she asked. "Why did you come into my life to
teach me that this beautiful world of ours can contain so much that is
bad?--you, whom I respected and admired, and whom I was beginning to
believe I loved? How could you do it?"

Covington made no answer to the impelling voice which spoke. The girl,
with her varying moods and changing conceits, who had so amused him, had
vanished, and in her place he saw the woman, supreme in the strength of
asserting that which is ever woman's creed,--justice and right. He could
sense, in her attitude, as in her words, that her resentment was not
because of the indignity which he had forced upon herself, but rather
because of the wrong he had done to those she loved. What a woman to
have called his wife,--what a woman to have lived up to as a husband!

"I must see your father again," he said when he spoke at last. "Let us
go back to them."

Covington stood in the doorway of the library as Alice slipped quietly
into the room and took her place beside Eleanor and her father. As he
looked upon the three, forming a group into which he had almost entered,
he realized the infinite distance which now separated them. Their total
disregard of his presence, Gorham's lack of open resentment, Alice's
indifference,--all told him that in their eyes he was only the pariah,
beneath their contempt, suffered to remain there until he saw fit to rid
them of his presence. Yet he could not leave them thus. Somewhere within
him a something, until now quiescent, demanded recognition and insisted
upon expression. Why had it waited until now! It was a changed John
Covington who spoke from that doorway, when at last silence became
unendurable. The hard lines in the face had softened, and the previously
insistent voice now betrayed realization of the present, and
hopelessness for the future. The fires of truth and love and faith and
honor, which burned so brightly before him, at least touched him with
their heat. God pity him!

"It is all over, Mr. Gorham," he forced himself to say. "It is not you
who have defeated me, it is I who have defeated myself. I offer no
defence. I despised myself before I did this, I despise myself still
further for having done it. I could not believe you sincere,--I could
not believe any man capable of living the creed you preached. I accept
the penalty which you or other men may impose upon me."

"You have imposed your own