eft when one loses
place and consequence before the world. It was a national bank, and the
charge was misapplication of funds. He had money enough for all the sane
uses of any man, but the pernicious ambition to be greater assailed him,
even old as he was.

"He never said, and I never have held it so, that his punishment was
unjust. Only it seemed to us unfair when so many greater evildoers
escape or receive pardons. You will remember, perhaps, that none of the
depositors lost anything. Wild as his schemes appeared, they turned out
sound enough after a while, and everything was liquidated.

"We gave up everything of our own; mother and I have felt the rub of
hardship before today. The hardest of all was the falling away of those
whom we believed to be friends. We learned that the favors of society
are as fickle as those of fortune, and that they walk hand in hand.

"No matter. Father's term will expire in less than one month. He is an
old, broken, disgraced man; he never will be able to lift up his face
before the world again. That is why I am here. Mother and I concluded
that we might make a refuge for him here, where he would be unknown. We
planned for him to leave his name, and as much of his past as he could
shake off, behind him at the prison door.

"It was no sacrifice for me. All that I had known in the old life was
gone. Sneers followed me; the ghosts of money rose up to accuse. I was a
felon's daughter; but, worse than that--I was poor! This country held
out its arms to me, clean and undefiled. When I got my first sight of
it, and the taste of its free air in my nostrils, my heart began to
unfold again, and the cramped wrinkles fell out of my tired soul."

The sunshine was around them, and the peace of the open places. They sat
for the world to see them, and there was nothing to hide in the sympathy
that moved Dr. Slavens to reach out and take the girl's hand. He
caressed it with comforting touch, as if to mitigate the suffering of
her heart, in tearing from it for his eyes to see, her hoarded sorrow
and unearned shame.

"There is that freedom about it," said he, "when one sees it by day and
sunlight."

"But it has its nights, too," she shuddered, the shadow of last night in
her eyes.

"Yet they all pass--the longest of them and the most painful," he
comforted her.

"And leave their scars sometimes. How I came here, registered, drew a
claim, and filed on it, you know. I did all that under the name of