e places he had assigned them--that was his only concern.

In one of those days of pause which come now and then in the busiest
lives she chanced upon his letters from Europe in her winter at Battle
Field. She took one of them from its envelope and began to
read--carelessly, with a languid curiosity to measure thus exactly the
change in herself. But soon she was absorbed, her mind groping through
letter after letter for the clue to a mystery. The Dumont she now knew
stood out so plainly in those letters that she could not understand how
she, inexperienced and infatuated though she then was, had failed to
see the perfect full-length portrait. How had she read romance and
high-mindedness and intellect into the personality so frankly flaunting
itself in all its narrow sordidness, in all its poverty of real thought
and real feeling?

And there was Hampden Scarborough to contrast him with. With this
thought the truth suddenly stared at her, made her drop the letter and
visibly shrink. It was just because Scarborough was there that she had
been tricked. The slight surface resemblance between the two men,
hardly more than the "favor" found in all men of the family of strong
and tenacious will, had led her on to deck the absent Dumont with the
manhood of the present Scarborough. She had read Scarborough into
Dumont's letters. Yes, and--the answers she addressed and mailed to
Dumont had really been written to Scarborough.

She tossed the letters back into the box from which they had reappeared
after four long years. She seated herself on the white bear-skin
before the open fire; and with hands clasped round her knees she rocked
herself slowly to and fro like one trying to ease an intolerable pain.

Until custom dulled the edge of that pain, the days and the nights were
the cruelest in her apprenticeship up to that time.

When her boy, Gardiner, was five years old, she got her father and
mother to keep him at Saint X with them.

"New York's no place, I think, to bring up and educate a boy in the
right way," she explained. And it was the truth, though not the whole
truth. The concealed part was that she would have made an open break
with her husband had there been no other way of safeguarding their
all-seeing, all-noting boy from his example.

Before Gardiner went to live with his grandparents she stayed in the
East, making six or eight brief visits "home" each year. When he went
she resolved to divide her year be