f you really loved me you could not quibble about the
thing you call duty." And he strode back and forth, refusing to take in
the situation.

Then the girl's forced composure gave way. This was not her first tilt
with the man she loved, but he had never been so hard, so desperate, so
unjust. Heroically she had tried to do her duty. Ignominously she now
felt herself faltering in the way.

He could not bear her tears. The sight of her grief drove him from
himself. Pausing before her, he said:

"Doris, I yield. Let it be as you say."

And he lifted her hand to his lips in adieu; though in his powerfully
imposed self-restraint he could not be all tenderness. His tones were
gentle, and in the look he cast upon her bowed figure there was no
reproach.

He was gone; and Doris went back to the mother who was unconscious that
she was wrecking the happiness of this devoted child; the only one left
to her. One by one they had married and gone, and now in her darkened
world she was enduring a more fearful weight of woe than blindness.
Ralph, her youngest, and her darling, the Benjamin of her old age, had
fled the country under the awful ban of murder. His employer, a hard
man, had been found dead in his private office from a blow on the back
of the head. Suspicion pointed to Ralph, who, poor, hot-headed fellow,
had been heard to vow vengeance against the dead man for his harshness.
A fellow clerk warned him in time to flee from the officers of the law.
He could not go without seeing his mother. In the silence of the night
he had clasped her trembling form in his stalwart young arms, and in
broken, quivering tones, bade her trust in his innocence. "Mother,
believe me, only believe me; I did not do it," and sped on in the
darkness, an exile. She did believe in him. She would almost as soon
have doubted her Savior's love. But her stern, unbending pride of race
was wounded. Her loving heart was pierced in its tenderest spot, and in
a few short weeks she was a fretful, peevish invalid, making wholesale
but unconscious draughts upon her noble daughter's patience.

Five years had gone by since these household fetters had been forged for
Doris. Young and lovely, she adorned every circle. Offers of marriage
were unheeded, and her heart was untouched till Warner Douglas, the
young physician, came. They had met when she was a school girl and he
a student in the same town; and now it was revealed to her why he had
chosen her place of res