you,” came from the green-covered sofa.

“But I am blaming myself.” He stopped abruptly before her. “Let me see your face, Glory: have you been trying to tell me that I ought to marry you?”

She would not look up. “And you with another girl in your heart? I’m not that wicked, Davie.”

“Then at least you must let me talk to you as we used to talk in the other days; straight from the shoulder. I was wiser than I knew, a little while ago, Glory, when I said that your safety was in marriage. Can’t you forget and start afresh? There are plenty of young fellows here in your part of town who would never ask you to turn back a single leaf of your life book for[64] them; can’t you marry one of them and make him a good wife, Glory?”

[64]

She shook her head. “I can not,” she said shortly.

He drew out his watch and held its dial to the lamp light. It was time to be gone.

“I must go; I am leaving town to-night, and the kindest thing I can hope for you is that you’ll never see my face again. It doesn’t help matters any, but if you have suffered, I shall suffer, too. You have put a mark on me that I shall carry to my grave.”

She got up without a word and walked with him to the door and down the slag-paved path to the gate. But at the moment of parting, when he was again seeking vainly for some word of heartening, she flung her arms around his neck and kissed him twice, thrice.

“That’s why I can’t marry another man!” she panted; and before he could reply she had darted up the path and into the cottage and had slammed the door.

It was an older and soberer David who tramped slowly back through the factory district and across the railroad tracks to the better lighted main street of the town. Conscience is definable only in terms, not of the common, but of the individual[65] human factor. For the David Vallorys there are no compromises. He either was, or was not, Judith Fallon’s keeper. Had he been responsible for her development up to a certain point, the danger point, and had then been blind enough or thoughtless enough to cast her adrift? One responsibility he could not shirk: from a time reaching deeply into their childish years his influence over her had been stronger than that of any one else, her parents not excepted. How was he to know that her yielding to him had been chiefly sexual, 

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