"I think not. There was not a sentiment between us. It is the way, occasionally, that a very bad woman is made, by marriage or wealth, respectable, and she declares war on her own past and its imitators. You were pursued because you had exchanged deserts with her. You were pure and abused; she was approved but tainted. Not your misfortunes but your goodness rebuked her, and she lashed you behind her _alias_, as every demon would riot in lashing the angels." "My husband," exclaimed Agnes, "where did you draw such secrets from woman's nature? God has blessed you with wisdom. I felt, myself, by some intuition of our sex, that it was sin, not virtue, that took such pains to upbraid me." "I drew them from the old, old plant," answered Andrew Zane; "the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Yonder, where I skimmed the surface of a bad woman; here, where I am forgiven." "If you felt remorse," said Agnes, "you were not given up." "After _we_ were engaged that woman cast her eyes on my widowed father and notified me that I must not stand in her way. 'If you embarrass me by one word,' she said to me in her pretty, timid way, but with the look of a lion out of her florid fringes, 'I will shatter your future hearthstone. You are not fit to marry a Christian woman like Agnes Wilt. I am good enough for your father--yes,' she finished, with terrible irony, 'and to be your mother!' Those words went with me around the world. Agnes, was I not punished?" "To think that the son of so good a man should be bound to such a tyrant." "Yes, she will make him steal for her, or worse. He will end by being her most degraded creature, leading and misleading to her. Theirs is an unreturning path. God keep us all faithful!" Duff Salter became again mysterious. He sent for his trunks, and gave his address as the "Treaty House," on Beach Street, nearly opposite the monument, only a square back from the Zane house. "Andrew," said Salter, when the young husband sought him there, "I concluded to move because there will be a nurse in that house before midsummer. If I was deaf as I once was, it would make no difference. But a very slight cry would certainly pierce my restored sensibilities now."