orm."

"I should think you had taken leave of your senses," Mrs. Breen
observed, with her spectacles intent upon her seam. "Did you think it
would be any consolation to him if you were drowned, or to her? And if,"
she added, her conscience rising equal to the vicarious demand upon it,
"you hoped there would be danger, had you any right to expose him to it?
Even if you chose to risk your own life, you had no right to risk his."
She lifted her spectacles again, and turned their austere glitter upon
her daughter.

"Yes, it all seems very silly now," said the girl, with a hopeless sigh.

"Silly!" cried her mother. "I'm glad you can call it silly."

"And it seemed worse still when he told me that he had never believed
it was going to storm that day, when he took Louise out. His man said it
was, and he repeated it because he saw I did n't want her to go."

"Perhaps," suggested Mrs. Breen, "if he was willing to deceive her then,
he is willing to deceive you now."

"He didn't deceive her. He said what he had heard. And he said it
because he--I wished it."

"I call it deceiving. Truth is truth. That is what I was taught; and
that's what I supposed I had taught you."

"I would trust Mr. Libby in anything," returned the daughter. "He is
perfectly frank about himself. He confessed that he had done it to
please me. He said that nothing else could excuse it."

"Oh, then you have accepted him!"

"No, mother, I haven't. I have refused him, and he is going away as
soon as Mr. Maynard comes." She sat looking at the window, and the tears
stole into her eyes, and blurred the sea and sky together where she saw
their meeting at the horizon line.

"Well," said her mother, "their that is the end of it, I presume."

"Yes, that's the end," said Grace. "But--I felt sorry for him, mother.
Once," she went on, "I thought I had everything clear before me; but now
I seem only to have made confusion of my life. Yes," she added drearily,
"it was foolish and wicked, and it was perfectly useless, too. I can't
escape from the consequences of what I did. It makes no difference what
he believed or any one believed. I drove them on to risk their lives
because I thought myself so much better than they; because I was
self-righteous and suspicious and stubborn. Well, I must bear the
penalty: and oh, if I could only bear it alone!" With a long sigh she
took back the burden which she had been struggling to cast off, and from
which for a time she had