m, you are cruel!"

"Now see here, Mrs. Huntington, I do not want to be rude to you. I have
lived in total ignorance of you and your affairs for twenty-five years,
and since by chance we meet on a steamer, you cannot make me feel that
what I do or say is of the slightest importance to you. You made the
young Tom Kinsella about as miserable as a man could be, but the old Tom
is immune from misery, thank God, and there is no use in trying to get a
flame from the dead ashes of the past. I am very glad to see you again
and especially glad to make the acquaintance of the daughter of my old
friend, George O'Brien."

"You forgive George but do not forgive me."

"I have nothing to forgive George, and you know it. He was the soul of
honor and had no idea of there being an engagement between us, when he
married you. I am as sure of this as though George himself had told me.
In those good old days in Paris when we were all of us art students,
George and I were great chums. I could read him like a book and there
never lived a more honest fellow.

"When my father died and his foundry at Newark seemed in a fair way to
be on its last legs for want of management and the family income was in
danger of being decidedly lessened, you persuaded me, in fact, you put
it up to me, to give you up or give up art and go to work and pull the
foundry out of the hole.

"Art meant a lot to me, but at the time you meant a lot more. You
remember you would not let me announce our engagement to our friends,
not even to George.

"I went back to America and piled into a work, entirely uncongenial, but
determined to win out. Things were in an awful mess because of my
father's long inability to attend to business. My brother Pierce was
still in college and could be of no assistance to me. I had to master
the business from the beginning, learning every detail before I could
put it on the efficiency basis that I knew it must attain before I could
be satisfied.

"I wrote you rather discouraged letters, I will admit, but I felt I
could pour out my soul to you and you alone. I knew it would be two or
three years before it would be expedient for us to marry, but my faith
in you was supreme and it never entered my head you would not wait for
me.

"When the goal was in sight, you may imagine the shock it gave me when a
casual acquaintance, recently returned from Paris, spoke of having had
such a gay time at your wedding breakfast, given in old George's stu