“You needn’t light up for me,” he returned, rising also.  “I am going.  Unless,” he added, with his coarse laugh, “you think it wouldn’t look well for Mrs. Horncastle to have been sitting in the dark with—­a stranger!” He paused as she contemptuously put down the candlestick and threw the unlit match into the grate.  “No, I’ve nothing more to tell.  He’s a fancy-looking pup.  You’d take him for twenty-one, though he’s only sixteen—­clean-limbed and perfect—­but for one thing”—­He stopped.  He met her quick look of interrogation, however, with a lowering silence that, nevertheless, changed again as he surveyed her erect figure by the faint light of the window with a sardonic smile.  “He favors you, I think, and in all but one thing, too.”

“And that?” she queried coldly, as he seemed to hesitate.

“He ain’t ashamed of me,” he returned, with a laugh.

The door closed behind him; she heard his heavy step descend the creaking stairs; he was gone.  She went to the window and threw it open, as if to get rid of the atmosphere charged with his presence,—­a presence still so potent that she now knew that for the last five minutes she had been, to her horror, struggling against its magnetism.  She even recoiled now at the thought of her child, as if, in these new confidences over it, it had revived the old intimacy in this link of their common flesh.  She looked down from her window on the square shoulders, thick throat, and crisp matted hair of her husband as he vanished in the darkness, and drew a breath of freedom,—­a freedom not so much from him as from her own weakness that he was bearing away with him into the exonerating night.

She shut the window and sank down in her chair again, but in the encompassing and compassionate obscurity of the room.  And this was the man she had loved and for whom she had wrecked her young life!  Or was it love? and, if not, how was she better than he?  Worse; for he was more loyal to that passion that had brought them together and its responsibilities than she was.  She had suffered the perils and pangs of maternity, and yet had only the mere animal yearning for her offspring, while he had taken over the toil and duty, and even the devotion, of parentage himself.  But then she remembered also how he had fascinated her—­a simple schoolgirl—­by his sheer domineering strength, and how the objections of her parents to this coarse and common man had forced her into a clandestine intimacy that ended in her complete subjection to him.  She remembered the birth of an infant whose concealment from her parents and friends was compassed by his low cunning; she remembered the late atonement of marriage preferred by the man she had already begun to loathe and fear, and who she now believed was eager only for her inheritance.  She remembered her abject compliance through the greater fear of the world, the stormy scenes that followed their ill-omened union, her final abandonment of her