ve kept
copies of her letters."

"Yes. Why didn't you?" his mother asked.

Verrian laughed, only a little less bitterly than before. "I shall begin
to believe you're all alike, mother."

I didn't keep copies of her letters because I wanted to get her and her
letters out of my mind, finally and forever. Besides, I didn't choose.
to emulate her duplicity by any sort of dissimulation.

"I see what you mean," his mother said. "And, of course, you have taken
the only honorable way."

Then they were both silent for a time, thinking their several thoughts.

Verrian broke the silence to say, "I wish I knew what sort of 'other
girl' it was that she 'got together with.'"

"Why?"

"Because she wrote a more cultivated letter than this magnanimous
creature who takes all the blame to herself."

"Then you don't believe they're both the same?"

"They are both the same in stationery and chirography, but not in
literature."

"I hope you won't get to thinking about her, then," his mother
entreated, intelligibly but not definitely.

"Not seriously," Verrian reassured her. "I've had my medicine."

V.

Continuity is so much the lesson of experience that in the course of a
life by no means long it becomes the instinctive expectation. The event
that has happened will happen again; it will prolong itself in a series
of recurrences by which each one's episode shares in the unending
history of all. The sense of this is so pervasive that humanity refuses
to accept death itself as final. In the agonized affections, the
shattered hopes, of those who remain, the severed life keeps on
unbrokenly, and when time and reason prevail, at least as to the life
here, the defeated faith appeals for fulfilment to another world, and
the belief of immortality holds against the myriad years in which none
of the numberless dead have made an indisputable sign in witness of it.
The lost limb still reports its sensations to the brain; the fixed
habit mechanically attempts its repetition when the conditions render it
impossible.

Verrian was aware how deeply and absorbingly he had brooded upon the
incident which he had done his utmost to close, when he found himself
expecting an answer of some sort from his unknown correspondent. He
perceived, then, without owning the fact, that he had really hoped for
some protest, some excuse, some extenuation, which in the end would
suffer him to be more merciful. Though he had wished to crush her into
sil