For days he could not talk about it to his mother, and she spent the hours upon her knees, while he went about stern and white, and Evadne did all in her power to make him see that times had changed and modern ways did not accept those puritan laws any more which he was holding forth as final and inexorable. Sin! What was _sin_? There _was_ no such thing! _Law!_ She laughed. Why keep a law that everyone else was breaking? It was all of a piece with his old fogy notions about drinking wine and having a good time. He was the dearest in all the world of course, but he was narrow. She held out her lily arms from the sheath-like black velvet gown she had assumed and pleaded with him to come with her, come out into the broad, free air of a big life! She was clever. She had caught most of the modern phrases. She knew how to appeal to the finer things in him, and _almost_ she won her point. Almost he wavered for just the fraction of a second, and thought, perhaps she is right—perhaps I am narrow. Then he lifted his eyes and saw his mother standing in the doorway, being shown in by a blundering servant, his fine patrician mother with her sweet, true eyes, and pure, sorrowful face, and he knew. He knew that Evadne was wrong, and his mother—yes his mother and he were right. There could be nothing but sin in a love that was stolen—a love that transgressed. He had gone away then and left his mother to talk to the other woman, and something, somewhere in his manhood had kept him away after that. He had written her fully his final word, with so stern a renunciation that even Evadne knew it was unalterable. He had laid down the law that they must not meet again, and had then gone away to another part of the country and established himself in business and tried to forget. That had been two years ago. Long years, he called it when he thought of them by himself. The haggard look of the gray young face had past away gradually, and the stern lines had softened as his fine mind and strong body and naturally cheerful spirit came back to normal, but there had been a reserve about him that made people think him a year or two older than he really was, and made some women when they met him call him “distinguished.” He had passed in the struggles of his soul, slowly away from the place where he regarded Evadne as a martyr, and had come at last to the time when he could look his experience squarely in the face and realize that she had been utterly untrue to all that was fine and womanly, and that he was probably saved from a life of sorrow and disappointment. Nevertheless, back in his soul there lingered his pity for her slender beauty, her pretty helplessness. A natural conclusion had come to him that all girls were deceitful, all beautiful women were naturally selfish and untrue. There were no more good, sweet, true girls nowadays as there were when his mother was a girl.