which
to confute Lois Montgomery's daughter.

"You found her what you would like your mother to be,--you didn't think
her hard or cruel?"

"No."

"You wouldn't have thought her a woman who would desert a husband and a
helpless baby and run away with another man?"

There was silence in the room. He had mercilessly condensed the case
against Lois Montgomery, reducing it to its harshest terms for Phil's
contemplation. It was in Phil's mind that she had nothing to do with
those things; that the woman against whose cheek she had laid her own
was not Thomas Kirkwood's recreant wife, but another and very different
person. She did not know how to express this; it seemed preposterous to
insist to her father that his former wife was not the same woman that
she had held speech with that day.

"I can't talk about her in that way, daddy. I can't tell you just how I
feel. But it seemed so wonderful, when I went into the house, and those
horrible creatures were circling round her like wolves, that we
understood each other, she and I, without a word being said! And I hated
them all, except dear old Amy. They all went home and Amy went off and
left us alone, and we talked just as though we had been old friends."

She ceased as though to attempt to describe it would be profanation.

"What did she say--about me?" he asked blindly.

"Oh, she didn't talk about you at all! It wasn't that kind of talk--not
about what she had done--not even about what she meant to do! She is so
young! She is just like a girl! And she speaks so charmingly, with the
loveliest voice. It's like the way the water ripples round the big
boulders at The Run."

"She hadn't anything to say about her going off? I don't quite believe
you mean that, Phil."

"That's exactly the truth, daddy"; and there was grieved surprise in her
tone. "Why, she isn't like that; she wouldn't ever say anything to hurt
any one. I haven't words to tell you about her, because there was never
any one like her. She is all sunniness and sweetness. And she's the most
amusing person I ever saw,--ever so droll and funny!"

Phil's refusal or inability to see her mother in robes of sin irritated
Kirkwood. For Phil to call her an amusing person was sheer childish
naivete. Phil was the victim of an infatuation which he could understand
now that his wife began to live again in his imagination. He had read in
books that the maternal instinct will assert itself after long
separations, where mo