She could not tell him that the son whose name he never took upon his lips was so near: that he whose crime his father's pride of name had hidden, through all the months since then, had gone down with the current, shunned by honest folk, adding to his one dismal act the weight of persistent repetition! She could not tell him this, even though that son now lived without memory of the evil he had done; though he struggled under a cloud of hatred, reaching out to clean deed and high resolve. Now, however, all distrust and trepidation had vanished. Strangely and suddenly the complex warfare in her mind had stilled. Standing with Mrs. Halloran, she had listened to the comment with shining eyes. Not that she distinguished any sudden and violent _volte-face_ of opinion to turn persecution to popularity and make the reprobate of to-day the favorite of to-morrow. But in its very reserve she instinctively felt a new tension of respect. Suspicion and dislike aside, there was none there who would again hinder the man who had made that race with death! For her own part, she only knew that she had no longer fear of soul or sense of irrevocable loss, or suffering. What were those old Bible words about being born again? What was that rebirth but a divine forgetting, a wiping out, a "remembering no more?" If it was the memory of his shame that had dragged him down, that memory was gone, perhaps for ever. The Hugh she now loved was not the Hugh who had sinned! She sat by David Stires that evening chatting gaily--he had been much weaker and more nervous of late and she would not have him told of the runaway--talking of cheerful things, radiating a glow from her own happiness that warmed the softly-lighted sick-room. All the while her heart was on the hillside where a rough cabin held him who embodied for her all the mystery and meaning of life. By a kind of clairvoyance she saw him sitting in the snug firelight, thinking perhaps of the instant their eyes had met. She did not guess that for him that moment had held an added pang. So the hours had passed, and the sun, when it rose next day, shone on a freshly created world. The wind no longer moaned for the lost legends of the trees. There was a bloom on every flowering bush, a song in the throat of every bird. She was full of new feelings that yielded in their sway only to new problems that loomed on her mental horizon. As the puzzle of the present cleared, the future was become the all-dominating thing. She knew now that she had never hated, had never really ceased to love. And Hugh? Love was not a mere product of times and places. It was only the memory that was gone, his love lived on underneath. Surely that was what the violin--what the look on his face had said! When the broken chain was welded, he would know her! Would it be chance--some sudden mental shock--that would furnish the clue? She had heard of such things.