If the gods favored the Montgomerys, they seemed no less to smile with a
peculiar indulgence upon the Kirkwoods. People who had said that Lois
was a trifle strong-willed and given to frivolity were convinced that
her marriage had done much to sober her. In the second year thereafter
Phyllis was born, a further assurance that Lois was thoroughly
established among the staid matrons of her native town. Then in the
fifth year of her marriage, rumors--almost the first scandalous gossip
that had ever passed current in those quiet streets--began to be heard.
It did not seem possible that in a community whose morals were nurtured
in Center Church, a town where everybody was "good," where no
respectable man ever entered a saloon and divorce was a word not to be
spoken before children,--that here, a daughter of the house of
Montgomery was causing anxiety among those jealous of her good name. A
few of Kirkwood's friends--and he had many--may have known the inner
history of the cloud that darkened his house; but the end came with a
blinding flash that left him dazed and dumb.

The town was so knit together, so like a big family, that Lois
Montgomery's escapade was a tragedy at every hearth-side. It was
immeasurably shocking that a young woman married to a reputable man, and
with a child still toddling after her, should have done this grievous
thing. To say that she had always been flighty, and that it was what
might have been expected of a woman as headstrong as she had been as a
girl, was no mollification of the blow to the local conscience, acutely
sensitive in all that pertained to the honor and sanctity of the
marriage tie. And Jack Holton! That she should have thrown away a man
like Tom Kirkwood, a gentleman and a scholar, for a rogue like Holton,
added to the blackness of her sin. The Holtons had been second only to
the Montgomerys in dignity. The conjunction of the names on the old sign
over the bank at Main and Franklin Streets had expressed not only
unquestioned financial stability, but a social worth likewise
unassailable. Jack Holton, like Amzi Montgomery, had inherited an
interest in the banking-house of Montgomery & Holton. To be sure his
brother William had been the active representative of the second
generation of Holtons, and Jack had never really settled down to
anything after he returned from the Eastern college to which he had been
sent; but these were things that had not been considered until after he
decamped