oned your name to me," she said, "and
I never heard that she did to anyone else. Why?"

"Thank you. That was all I wanted to know," said Lawrence, ignoring
her question, and disappearing as suddenly as he had come.

That evening at moonrise he passed through the kitchen dressed in his
Sunday best. His mother met him at the door.

"Where are you going?" she asked querulously.

Lawrence looked her squarely in the face with accusing eyes, before
which her own quailed.

"I'm going to see Bessy Houghton, Mother," he said sternly, "and to
ask her pardon for believing the lie that has kept us apart so long."

Mrs. Eastman flushed crimson and opened her lips to speak. But
something in Lawrence's grave, white face silenced her. She turned
away without a word, knowing in her secret soul that her youngest-born
was lost to her forever.

Lawrence found Bessy in the orchard under apple trees that were
pyramids of pearly bloom. She looked at him through the twilight with
reproach and aloofness in her eyes. But he put out his hands and
caught her reluctant ones in a masterful grasp.

"Listen to me, Bessy. Don't condemn me before you've heard me. I've
been to blame for believing falsehoods about you, but I believe them
no longer, and I've come to ask you to forgive me."

He told his story simply and straightforwardly. In strict justice he
could not keep his mother's name out of it, but he merely said she had
been mistaken. Perhaps Bessy understood none the less. She knew what
Mrs. Eastman's reputation in Lynnfield was.

"You might have had a little more faith in me," she cried
reproachfully.

"I know--I know. But I was beside myself with pain and wretchedness.
Oh, Bessy, won't you forgive me? I love you so! If you send me away
I'll go to the dogs. Forgive me, Bessy."

And she, being a woman, did forgive him.

"I've loved you from the first, Lawrence," she said, yielding to his
kiss.

Their Girl Josie

When Paul Morgan, a rising young lawyer with justifiable political
aspirations, married Elinor Ashton, leading woman at the Green Square
Theatre, his old schoolmates and neighbours back in Spring Valley held
up their hands in horror, and his father and mother up in the
weather-grey Morgan homestead were crushed in the depths of
humiliation. They had been too proud of Paul ... their only son and
such a clever fellow ... and this was their punishment! He had married
an actress! To Cyrus and Deborah Morgan, brought