is not customary to tell this about men, either in real life or
in novels. There is a great deal of concealment in the world
about matters of sex; and in such matters the truth-telling man
is apt to suffer in reputation in comparison with the truth-
concealing one.

Nor had George really been altogether callous about the thing.
It had happened that his best friend had died in his arms; and
this had so affected the guilty pair that they had felt their
relationship was no longer possible. She had withdrawn to nurse
her grief alone, and George had been so deeply affected that he
had avoided affairs and entanglements with women until his
meeting with Lizette.

All this was now in the far distant past, but it had made a
deeper impression upon George than he perhaps realized, and it
was now working in his mind and marring his happiness. Here was
a girl who loved him with a noble and unselfish and whole-hearted
love--and yet he would never be able to trust her as she
deserved, but would always have suspicions lurking in the back of
his mind. He would be unable to have his friends intimate in his
home, because of the memory of what he had once done to a friend.
It was a subtle kind of punishment. But so it is that Nature
often finds ways of punishing us, without our even being aware of
it.

That was all for the future, however. At present, George was
happy. He put his black sin behind him, feeling that he had
obtained absolution by his confession to Henriette. Day by day,
as he realized his good fortune, his round face beamed with more