It was days before Verrian could confess himself of the fact to his
mother, who listened with the justice instinctive in her. She still had
not spoken when he ended, and he said, "I have thought it all over, and I
feel that he did right. He did the only thing that a man in love with
her could do. And I don't wonder he's in love with her. Yes"--he stayed
his mother, imperatively--"and such a man as he, though he ground me in
the dirt and stamped on me, I will say, it, is worthy of any woman. He
can believe in a woman, and that's the first thing that's needed to make
a woman like her, true. I don't envy his job." He was speaking
self-contradictorily, irrelevantly, illogically, as a man thinks. He
went on in that way, getting himself all out. "She isn't single-hearted,
but she's faithful. She'll never betray him now. She's never given him
any reason to distrust her. She's the kind that can keep on straight
with any one she's begun straight with. She told him all that before me
be cause she wanted me to know--to realize--that she had told him. It
took courage."

Mrs. Verrian had thought of generalizing, but she seized a single point.
"Perhaps not so much courage as you think. You mustn't let such bravado
impose upon you, Philip. I've no doubt she knew her ground."

"She took the chance of his casting her off."

"She knew he wouldn't. She knew him, and she knew you. She knew that if
he cast her off--"

"Mother! Don't say it! I can't bear it!"

His mother did not say it, or anything more, then. Late at night she