n home while she visited
with schoolmates, or travelled abroad with new and gayer friends.
Caroline was the music of their dull lives; the art of their prosaic
existences. Then the shock came when she announced her engagement to
Lansing Hertford, an idle, useless son of a down-at-the-heel Southern
family.

"He's no fit mate for you, Caroline," Markham said alarmedly.

"That may be, brother," the girl had replied, "but I must marry him.
You have always said one must learn his own lesson, not another's. I
am ready to take the consequences. I could never get away from the
sound of Lansing Hertford's voice. I hear him at night. He tells me
that when temptation or weakness overpowers him he breathes my name.
So, you see, dear, I cannot escape."

"Don't be a fool, Caroline!"

Markham struggled against the sense of impotency surging around him.

"It's my lesson, dear. I'll never wince."

And she never had, even when Hertford's indifference changed to
cruelty. After the birth of her child, Caroline Hertford failed
rapidly and the end of her lesson came when her boy was two years old.
Markham and Matilda had desired to take the baby then, but Mrs. Olive
Treadwell, Hertford's married sister, put in a protest.

"It would blight the boy's future if any gossip touched the dead mother
or bereaved father; besides he is too young to change nurses or
environment."

When little Lansing was seven his father died abroad under conditions
shrouded with secrecy, and then it was that Olive Treadwell sought Levi
Markham and by methods unknown to the simple, direct man, contrived to
interest him in her nephew and his.

"There'll be a mighty big fortune some day for some one to inherit--why
not Lans?" she argued to herself and began her campaign. She had grown
to love the boy in her vain, worldly way; she wanted him _and_ the
Markham money, and she cautiously felt her way through the years while
the child was with her.

"I hear my nephew is called by your name," Levi remarked once during a
call at the Boston home of the Treadwells.

"Just a childish happening. You know how simple little minds are;
having no mother but me, he calls me mommy, and naturally people speak
of him carelessly by my name."

"He should bear his own and seek to honour it," Markham returned with
simplicity equalling a child's. Mrs. Treadwell winced. She dared not
show how she resented any unkind reference to her brother, but she had
always looked d