a little
boy--the bonniest little boy that ever was!--my life has been all
Bertie. I remember him, with long curls hanging down his back and his
gray eyes opened wide, when he stood on tiptoe at the piano and touched
the little tunes that he had heard, and looked over his shoulder at me
and laughed for pleasure in his music. I can see his little
baby-fingers--the little soft fingers I used to kiss--on the keys
now.--Oh, Bertie, why didn't you die then?"

She stopped as if checked by a sudden thought, and looked so quickly up
at Percival that she caught an answer in his eyes that he would never
have uttered.

"Ah, yes, he would have been the same," she said. "He _was_ the same
then: I know it. They used to praise me, when I was a child, for giving
everything up to Bertie. As if he were not my happiness! And it has been
so always. And now I have sacrificed Miss Crawford to Bertie--my dear
old friend, my mother's friend, who is worth ten times as much as Bertie
ever was or ever will be! Is not this a fine ending of all?"

Percival broke the silence after a moment's pause. "_Is_ it an ending of
all?" he said. "Bertie has been very wrong, but it has been partly
thoughtlessness. He is very young, and if he should do well hereafter
may there not even yet be a future to which you may look forward? As for
the world, it is not disposed to look on a runaway match of this sort as
a crime."

She turned her eyes full upon him, and he stopped.

"Oh, the world!" she said. "The world will consider it a sort of young
Lochinvar affair, no doubt. But how much of the young Lochinvar do you
think there is about Bertie, Mr. Thorne? You have heard him speak of
Emmeline Nash sometimes--not as often nor as freely as he has spoken to
me; still, you have heard him. And judging from that, do you believe he
is in love with her?"

"Well--no," said Thorne reluctantly. "Hardly that."

"A thousand times no! If by any possibility he had loved her, foolishly,
madly, with a passion that blinded him to the cruel wrong he was doing,
it would all have been different. I should have blamed him, but in spite
of Miss Crawford I should have forgiven him; I should have had hope; he
would have been my Bertie still; I should not have despised him. But
this is cold and base and horrible: he has simply sold himself for
Emmeline's money--sold himself, his smiles and his pretty speeches and
his handsome face. And now it is all over."

As Judith spoke Percival u