"Bah-h! I beg you will not do me the injustice of the thought. Do you know, Semple, the incomprehensible thing about it now to me is that I should ever have wasted love upon her. I have asked myself a hundred times what it was I thought I loved and where it had gone. That is where the sting of it comes in. It isn't that she should have thrown me over for the old man and his millions,--but that I shouldn't have known from the first that she wasn't--oh, well! It is over. It is just exactly with me as though it had never been, except--" "Except--" "--that I am wiser." "But not better," thought the physician. "The trouble about these things is that they never leave a man the same. Something is always burned out of him." Aloud he said, "She is only one woman, Dick. A man always has a mother." Richard De Jarnette's face softened less than one would suppose. "My mother was but a name to me," he said. "She died in giving me birth. I have--" "Then by her birth pangs she has made you a debtor to all womankind," interrupted the doctor, a little sternly, "and if she gave her life for yours--" "I do not acknowledge the indebtedness," his host returned, coldly. "I did not ask to be brought into this world. Now that I am here I can do nothing less than try to keep myself up, but I do not see that I have any special cause for gratitude to the ones who imposed this responsibility upon me." "If your mother had lived, De Jarnette, you would have felt differently," said the doctor, quietly, almost gently. "You would have known then, as you never can now, the breadth and depth of a mother's devotion." "You forget that my father was thoughtful enough to provide me with a second mother. And since I recall it, perhaps you may remember the depth of that mother's devotion to _her_ child." He spoke with bitterest satire. "I have only heard rumors about it," answered his friend. "I'll tell you that story. A few words will do. The mother that my father gave me when I was nine years old, set herself first of all to alienate his affections from me, his child, and succeeded." "She would have failed if he had been your mother," interjected the doctor in the slight pause. "I am not sure of that, though I mean no disrespect to a mother who was buried too deep to rescue her child from all the indignities that woman heaped upon him. I will pass quickly over that, Semple. To this day it hurts me to think of it. I have never seen a man cruel to a child since without wanting to kill him, and a woman--" "Was it the same after her own child came?"