ave guessed had not my own baseness
blinded me to the truth--when he told me he was your brother, I saw
myself, my real self,--my shriveled, black, hellish soul. Now you see
why I must go down again. I can never make reparation for what I have
done. But I can at least go down to him."

"You take all the blame on yourself!" she protested. "What if I had
confessed my secret, there at the first, when Tom sprang down from the
car and I knew him."

"If you had told, then I should not have been tempted to doubt you,
and I should have gone on, it might have been forever, with that lie
and that theft between us--and I should not have been forced to see,
as I now see, my absolute unworthiness of you."

"Of me!" she cried shrilly, and she burst into wild hysterical
laughter. It broke off as abruptly as it began. "Unworthy of me--of
me? the daughter of a drunken mother, the sister of a girl who--" A
sob choked her. She went on desperately: "You have told me all. But
I--do you not wonder why I kept silent--why I denied Mary by my
silence? You say you sought to harm Tom--down there. You did not know
he was my brother. You thought he would harm me. Is it not so?"

"I doubted you!"

"Why? Because I failed to tell the truth. I feared to hurt him--to
make trouble between him and his rich, high-bred wife. As if I should
not have known better the moment I saw Genevieve! Dear sister! she
knows all. But you--Either I should have spoken, or I should have
hidden all my fondness for him. But I could not hide my love for
him--and I was ashamed to tell."

"Ashamed--you?"

"We lived in the slums. They told me my father was a big man, a man
such as Tom is now. He was a railroad engineer. He was killed when I
was a baby. Then we sank into the slums. My mother--she died when I
was twelve. There was then only Mary and I and Tom. He could make only
a little, working at odd jobs. Mary and I worked in a factory. Even
she was under age. When I was going on fourteen there came a terrible
winter when thousands were out of work. We almost starved."

"You--starved!" murmured Ashton. "Starved! And I was starting in at
college, flinging away money!"

"Tom tried to force people to let him work," the girl went on
drearily. "He was violent. They put him in jail. Soon Mary and I had
nothing left. There was no work for us. We had sold everything that
anyone would buy. The rent was overdue. They turned us out--on the
streets.... I was too young; but Mary