“’Tis to a convent I should have gone, Davie, instead of to the public—to run with boys, and with you. ’Twas you taught me things a girl shouldn’t know.”

“I?” said David, still more horror-stricken.

“’Tis so. I was a woman grown whilst you were yet but a boy. You didn’t know. If your lady mother had lived she might have told you more about girls and women. I was loving you, Davie, long before ever you put a razor to your face.”

For the first time in his life David the man found it easeful and fitting to curse David the[62] boy. “Warm-hearted,” he had called Judith in those other days, and thought no more of it. But now ... he had been as one who tosses a careless match aside and passes on, only to turn and find a forest ablaze.

[62]

“Tell me what you care to, Glo,” he said gravely.

“’Tis an old story, I’m thinking. Whilst I could be writing to you and knowing you’d be coming back from the college the bad heart of me kept still. But when you went to that place in Florida the bad heart was empty—empty for a man. The man came, Davie; I’m thinking he always comes.”

David had to moisten his lips before he could say: “Who was it, Glo?”

“’Twas young Tommy Judson.”

“God!” said David. The exclamation was half prayer and half execration. He knew Judson; all Middleboro knew him as the country town’s most faithful imitation of gilded youth and its degeneracy. After a time he said: “Somebody ought to kill him, Glo; I ought to kill him.”

“’Tis little good that would do now. He’s gone away, and my father would be getting a raise in his pay, little knowing why he got it.”

Though the windows were open to the summer[63] night breeze David felt as if he were suffocating. Springing to his feet he began to pace the narrow limits of the little sitting-room.

[63]

“Glo,” he said chokingly, “this is the most awful thing I’ve ever had to face. I came here to-night just as I used to come years ago. I meant to tell you that I had found the girl that I hoped some day to marry. And now you tell me that I led you up to the edge and left you where the next man who came along could push you over.”

“No, Davie, dear; I’m not blaming 

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