“I made it,” said Mrs. Ayres.  “I attend to everything.  I have attended to everything.”  She gazed at him with a strange, pathetic dignity.  “I have no apologies nor excuses to make to you,” she said.  “I have only this to say, and you can reflect upon it at your leisure.  Sometimes, quite often, it may happen that too heavy a burden, a burden which has been gathering weight since the first of creation, is heaped upon too slender shoulders.  This burden may bend innocence into guilt and modesty into shamelessness, but there is no more reason for condemnation than in a case of typhoid fever.  Any man of good sense and common Christianity should take that view of it.”

“I do,” cried Horace, hurriedly.  He looked longingly at the door.  He had never felt so shamed in his life, and never so angrily sympathetic.

“I will go over to Mrs. Steele’s and telephone immediately,” said Mrs. Ayres, calmly.  “Good-morning, Mr. Allen.”

“Good-morning,” said Horace.  There was something terrible about the face of patient defiance which the woman lifted to his.

“You will not—­” she began.

Horace caught her thin hand and pressed it heartily.  “Good God, Mrs. Ayres!” he stammered.

She nodded.  “Yes, I understand.  I can trust you,” she said.  “I am very glad it happened with you.”

Horace was relieved to be out in the open air.  He felt as if he had escaped from an atmosphere of some terrible emotional miasma.  He reflected that he had heard of such cases as poor Lucy Ayres, but he had been rather incredulous.  He walked along wondering whether it was a psychological or physical phenomenon.  Pity began to get the better of his shame for himself and the girl.  The mother’s tragic face came before his eyes.  “What that woman must have to put up with!” he thought.

When he had commenced the morning session of school he found himself covertly regarding the young girls.  He wondered if such cases were common.  If they were, he thought to himself that the man who threw the first stone was the first criminal of the world.  He realized the helplessness of the young things before forces of nature of which they were brought up in so much ignorance, and his soul rebelled.  He thought to himself that they should be armed from the beginning with wisdom.

He was relieved that at first he saw in none of the girl-faces before him anything which resembled in the slightest degree the expression which he had seen in Lucy Ayres’s.  These girls, most of them belonging to the village (there were a few from outside, for this was an endowed school, ranking rather higher than an ordinary institution), revealed in their faces one of three interpretations of character.  Some were full of young mischief, chafing impatiently at the fetters of school routine.  They were bubbling over with innocent animal life; they were longing to be afield at golf or tennis.  They hated their books.