going down," and while he was still protesting she was gone.

"Miss Kenton seems so much better than she did the first day," he said,
as he spread the map out on his knees, and gave Mrs. Kenton one end to
hold.

"Yes," the mother assented, as she bent over to look at it.

She followed his explanation with a surface sense, while her nether mind
was full of the worry of the question which Ellen had planted in it.
What would such a man think of what she had been through? Or, rather,
how would he say to her the only things that in Mrs. Kenton's belief he
could say? How could the poor child ever be made to see it in the
light of some mind not colored with her family's affection for her? An
immense, an impossible longing possessed itself of the mother's heart,
which became the more insistent the more frantic it appeared. She
uttered "Yes" and "No" and "Indeed" to what he was saying, but all the
time she was rehearsing Ellen's story in her inner sense. In the end she
remembered so little what had actually passed that her dramatic reverie
seemed the reality, and when she left him she got herself down to
her state-room, giddy with the shame and fear of her imaginary
self-betrayal. She wished to test the enormity, and yet not find it so
monstrous, by submitting the case to her husband, and she could scarcely
keep back her impatience at seeing Ellen instead of her father.

"Momma, what have you been saying to Mr. Breckon about me?"

"Nothing," said Mrs. Kenton, aghast at first, and then astonished to
realize that she was speaking the simple truth. "He said how much better
you were looking; but I don't believe I spoke a single word. We were
looking at the map."

"Very well," Ellen resumed. "I have been thinking it all over, and now I
have made up my mind."

She paused, and her mother asked, tremulously, "About what, Ellen?"

"You know, momma. I see all now. You needn't be afraid that I care
anything about him now," and her mother knew that she meant Bittridge,
"or that I ever shall. That's gone forever. But it's gone," she added,
and her mother quaked inwardly to hear her reason, "because the wrong
and the shame was all for me--for us. That's why I can forgive it,
and forget. If we had done anything, the least thing in the world, to
revenge ourselves, or to hurt him, then--Don't you see, momma?"

"I think I see, Ellen."

"Then I should have to keep thinking about it, and what we had made him
suffer, and whether we hadn'