retaliation. So soon as she could speak after her accident, she told
them that they must not write to him and tell him of it. She also made
them promise that they would give him no news of her at all, save that
she was well. They could not refuse to promise; they felt she had the
right to demand much more than that. They had begun to care for her for
herself, and when the months went by, and one day there was a hush about
her room, and anxiety, and then relief, in the faces of all, they came to
care for her still more for the sake of her child.

As the weeks passed, the fair-haired child grew more and more like his
father; but if Lali thought of her husband they never knew it by anything
she said, for she would not speak of him. She also made them promise
that they would not write to him of the child's birth. Richard, with his
sense of justice, and knowing how much the woman had been wronged, said
that in all this she had done quite right; that Frank, if he had done his
duty after marrying her, should have come with her. And because they all
felt that Richard had been her best friend as well as their own, they
called the child after him. This also was Lali's wish. Coincident with
her motherhood there came to Lali a new purpose. She had not lived with
the Armours without absorbing some of their fine social sense and
dignity. This, added to the native instinct of pride in her, gave her a
new ambition. As hour by hour her child grew dear to her, so hour by
hour her husband grew away from her. She schooled herself against him.
--At times she thought she hated him. She felt she could never forgive
him, but she would prove to him that it was she who had made the mistake
of her life in marrying him; that she had been wronged, not he; and that
his sin would face him with reproach and punishment one day. Richard's
prophecy was likely to come true: she would defeat very perfectly indeed
Frank's intentions. After the child was born, so soon as she was able,
she renewed her studies with Richard and Mrs. Armour. She read every