is as if you tried to make me hate him,"
Daisy said, passionately.

"You know I would not wish to do
that. I have seen him, pretty, harmless
little fellow. Your choice is made to keep
him, and mine is made to take you and
him into my keeping. I won't pretend it
was made without a struggle. But once
made, it is made."

Daisy paused before she spoke."That
can never be," she then said, firmly. "You
used to call me your flower, but I have
been trampled into the mud, crushed into
it! I will not be picked up and worn
upon your breast."

"Yes, Daisy, you will. I will tell you
why you will. All is different from what
I had dreamt and hoped. For the present
all the joy is gone out of life. Angry with
you, poor child, I am not. How can I be?
But all is changed. Nevertheless, more
than ever you needed me, you now need
me. You are entirely unable to bear the
brunt and the burden of life with your
child. I am entirely unable, because you
are still so dear to me, to leave you to do
so. You must be my wife, Daisy, sheltered
under my name. You will not refuse me,
because only so can I have any ease or
rest."

"No, Kenneth, no; don't set your will
on this. It is not fit. I am so utterly
unfit. I could go so far away that our
paths need never cross, and in time, thinking
of me as happy with my boy, you
would be able to forget me. I could go
abroad. I would take his name if you
think I ought. Why should I not be safe,
living as a widow with my son?"

"Daisy, don't waste your strength and
mine. Believe me, I know best what is
best for both of us, for all three of us.
Since you are not to be parted from your
child I take the child with you. It has a
look of you in its face, Daisy, and of your
Wattie. I won't be unkind to it."

"What folly to tell me that," she said,
laughing and crying. "You unkind to a
child — to anything?"

"To his child I could find it in my heart
to be murderously unkind, but for that
look of you and of Wattie," he said, passionately.

"I can't help feeling that one day you
will repent, Kenneth. I can't help fearing
I am wrong if— I shall be wrong if I
yield."

"Leave off feeling and believing for the
present," he said, "and just rest here,"
opening his arms to her, "and tell me all
about it. I must know; there shall be no
dark corners any more. If you can bear
to tell me now, I would like to be told at
once."

He sat by her, and put his arm round
her, rather in support than in tenderness.
Perhaps if she had known half of what was
in his mind she would never have yielded.
Yet the result of it all was just this— just
what he had told her— that he felt his
protection indispensable to her, and that
he still loved her so truly and deeply that
there could be for him no ease of heart or
life unless he had her in his care. That
was the result of it all; but he knew that
for this he would pay a price. Though
Daisy was blameless, no doubt, of all but
the weak folly of concealment, that weak
folly would prove to have drawn upon her
fair name such a cloud of suspicious-seeming
mystery, as it would be intensely
painful to any man should rest upon the
antecedents of his wife. He sat beside
her in the fire-lighted dusk, half hiding his
face with one hand, and listened to her
story. What the story was we know;
what it was to him to hear and to her to
tell him, it is not easy to know. Once or
twice she faltered, almost failed in power
to speak.

"Must I go on?" she asked.

"If you can you had better, Daisy; it
will be well to have it told and over."

"Yes," she answered meekly, and then
soon continued. When she came to the
finding Wattie lying drowned on the riverside
grass, to the vow she had vowed
kneeling by him, she broke into passionate
weeping. "Kenneth, Kenneth, help me to
forget it all!"

He strained her to him then with soothing
words. "Courage, it will soon be
over, and then, indeed, poor Daisy, I will
help you to forget it all."

Nearer the end, when she had to speak
of her husband's treatment of her, a literal
holding her in hell, as it seemed to both
of them, it was Mr. Stewart who, for a
moment, interrupted her story, starting up
with some inarticulate exclamation.

She pleaded then, "Let me spare you
and myself, let me leave the rest untold."

"No, Daisy. All you can bear to tell I
wish to hear. I am not a woman to stop
my ears from hearing. It is not the horror
of the thing itself, it is the horror of your
having suffered it. Don't you understand?"

"Oh yes— I know. But, Kenneth, can
you believe what I tell you? I, as I tell it,
don't believe it. Surely his badness was
madness. It doesn't seem to me possible