gathering twilight, then whipped up his horse, and was swiftly out of
sight. Against his better judgment, he was shaken in mind and body.
Could he have seen a ghost? Nonsense! He was tired, he had
overworked, he had had an hallucination. His cool, calm, professional
sense fought with the insistent idea. It was well that Ralph was
coming to relieve his old father of a part of his burden.

Meanwhile, Miss Evelina, her frail body quivering as though under the
lash, crept back into the house. With the sure intuition of a woman,
she knew who had driven by in the first darkness. That he should dare!
That he should actually trespass upon her road; take the insolent
liberty of looking at her house!

"A pretty young wife," Miss Hitty had said. Yes, doubtless a pretty
one. Anthony Dexter delighted in the beauty of a woman in the same
impersonal way that another man would regard a picture. And a son. A
straight, tall young fellow, doubtless, with eyes like his
father's--eyes that a woman would trust, not dreaming of the false
heart and craven soul. Why had she been brought here to suffer this
last insult, this last humiliation? Weakly, as many a woman before
her, Miss Evelina groped in the maze of Life, searching for some clue
to its blind mystery.

Was it possible that she had not suffered enough? If five-and-twenty
years of sodden misery were not sufficient for one who had done no
wrong, what punishment would be meted out to a sinner by a God who was
always kind? Miss Evelina's lips curled scornfully. She had taken
what he should have borne--Anthony Dexter had gone scot free.

"The man sins and the woman pays." The cynical saying, which, after