"You'll have your home, mother," said Warwick
tenderly, accepting the implied surrender.
"You'll have your friends and relatives, and the
knowledge that your children are happy. I'll let
you hear from us often, and no doubt you can see
Rena now and then. But you must let her go,
mother,--it would be a sin against her to refuse."

"She may go," replied the mother brokenly.
"I'll not stand in her way--I've got sins enough
to answer for already."

Warwick watched her pityingly. He had stirred
her feelings to unwonted depths, and his sympathy
went out to her. If she had sinned, she had been
more sinned against than sinning, and it was not
his part to judge her. He had yielded to a
sentimental weakness in deciding upon this trip to
Patesville. A matter of business had brought him
within a day's journey of the town, and an over-
mastering impulse had compelled him to seek the
mother who had given him birth and the old town
where he had spent the earlier years of his life.
No one would have acknowledged sooner than he
the folly of this visit. Men who have elected to
govern their lives by principles of abstract right
and reason, which happen, perhaps, to be at variance
with what society considers equally right and
reasonable, should, for fear of complications, be