Brevoort critter has trimmed Ken's
lamps so's they'll burn steady without flickerin' he'll light up yuah
life foh all time, honey. An' she's almost got thu jawb done, or I miss
my guess! Yuh take my advice, an' when he comes cavortin' about yeah
again within ropin' distance get yuah string on him and corral him foh
keeps. He'll be good from now on if you give him thu chanct. An' if yuh
don't, he'll run rampageous to the bad--an' yuh'll be to blame!"

And the wise old woman was even wiser than she knew. At that very
moment, Douglass, looking at a picture that should have logically
thrilled him to the core, was travailing in a morose discontent quite
incompatible with his environment. The woman for whose sake he had
imperiled all that a man holds dear, was sitting opposite him on the
hotel veranda In the soft moonlight, with little Eulalie cuddled closely
to her. Every full, round line of her betokened her perfect fitness for
maternity and the motherhood implanted in every woman's heart was softly
irradiating her face as she bent caressingly over the sleeping child.
Intended by Nature as a mother of soldiers, here by the caprice of fate
she was fostering the weak offspring of another less fit, denied
woman's highest mission, debarred from Nature's most noble function. And
he had but to say the word!

For that afternoon, in an agony of passion, she had whispered a
temptation in his ear, clinging to him with all the seductiveness in her
nature:

"Let us go away, dear, anywhere, anywhere, so that we are together!
There will be a separation without any publicity, for he is very proud;
and he really never cared! Make me the wife and mother that Nature
intended me to be; give me the fulfillment that is every woman's due!"

It came to him with a shock, for he had been living only in the
enjoyment of the present. Brought face to face with the eternal future,
he realized a great unpreparedness, abnormal as it was disquieting. He
had answered her evasively, with a politic tenderness that satisfied her
temporarily; but he knew that her insistence was only deferred, and his
answer was not ready. And to-night he was cursing the inevitable
brutality that he knew he would ultimately be compelled to exercise.

For even as his soul yearned at the tender appeal of that picture most
exquisite to man, the mothering of a child, the beauteous face before
him was replaced by another, reproachful and haughty yet fair with a
purity and beau