As for Aurora, she had before this well won her fight of all these years. She was known as the town milliner, a woman honorable in her business transactions and prompt with all her bills. Socially she had no place. She was not invited to any home, any table. The best people of the town, the banker's wife, the families of the leading merchants, bought bonnets of her. Ministers--while yet new in their pulpits--had been known to call upon her sometimes--one had even offered to kneel and pray with her in her workroom, promising her salvation even yet, and telling her the story of the thief upon the cross. Once Aurora Lane went to church and sat far back, unseen, but she did so no longer now, had not for many years, feeling that she dared not appear in the church--the church which had not ratified her nuptial night! She had her place, definite and yet indefinite, accepted and yet rejected, here in this village. But gradually, dumbly, doggedly she had fought on; and she had won. Long since, Spring Valley had ceased openly to call up her story. If once she had been wearer of the scarlet letter, the color thereof had faded these years back. She was the town milliner, a young woman under suspicion always, but no man could bring true word against her character. She had sinned--once--no more. If she had known opportunity for other sins than her first one, she held her peace. Human nature were here as it is elsewhere--women as keen; men as lewd. But the triumph of Aurora Lane might now have been called complete. She had "lived it down." This long and terrible battle of one woman against so many strangely enough had not wholly embittered her life, so strong and sweet and true and normal had it originally been. She still could smile--smile in two fashions. One was a pleasant, sunny and open smile for those who came in the surface affairs of life. The other was deeper, a slow, wry smile, very wise, and yet perhaps charitable, after all. Aurora Lane knew! But all these years she had worked on with but one purpose--to bring up her boy and to keep her boy in ignorance of his birth. He had never known--not in all these years! It had been her dream, her prayer, that he might never know. And now he knew--he must know. They stepped through the little picket gate, up the tiny brick walk and across the little narrow porch together, into the tiny apartments which had been the arena for Aurora Lane--in which she had fought for her own life, her own soul, and for the life of her son, her tribute to the scheme of life itself. Here lay the _penetralia_ of this domicile, this weak fortification against the world.