He sat, his lips loosely working now, his eyes red, his face flabby, his gray hair tumbled on his temples. It was as though all life's excesses and indulgences had culminated and taken full revenge on him in this one day. "And you can say that to me?" he murmured. It was very difficult for him to talk. He was broken--he was gone--he was just an old man--a shell, a rim, a ruin of a man, now seeing himself as he actually had been all these years--God knows, a pitiable sight, that, for many and many a man of us all. "I'm--I'm afraid, Will! Last night--it broke me, someway--I don't think much more can happen.... I can't think--I can't pull together, someway.... I was going down to the bridge tonight.... But I thought of Don." "But you couldn't think of _me_, Aurora?--Have you ever, in all these years?" She made him no answer at all. "No. You could only hate the thought of me," he said. "What a coward I've been, what a cur! Ah, what a coward I've been all these years!" "I wish you wouldn't, Will," she said. Dazed, troubled, she was trying to think in terms of the present; trying, as she had said, to pull together. "You are Don's father.... Well, you were a man, Will," she added, sighing. "I was only a woman." She had neither sarcasm nor resentfulness in her words. It was simply what she had learned by herself, in her own life, without any great horizon in the world. "It was pretty hard sometimes," said she, after a time, slowly. "I had to contrive so much. Putting the boy through college--it began to cost more the last four years--so much more than we had supposed it would. You know, sometimes I was almost----" She flushed and paused. "What was it, Aurie?" "At one time not long ago, the bills were so large that we had to pay--it was so hard to get the money, I was almost on the point of going to you--for him, you know--and to ask you for a little help. But that's all over now." "Oh, I ought to have come through--I ought to have owned it all up!" "Yes, Will, you ought." "Why did you keep it--why didn't you name me? I always thought, for a long time, that you would, that you must." "I don't know. Don't ask me anything. But at least, Don's out now. Thank God! he's clear--he's innocent, and they all know it now. They can't keep him down, can they? He won't have as hard a time as I've had? He'll succeed, won't he? He must, after it all!" "Yes," said the man, shaking as in a palsy, "after it all, he ought to, and I pray he may." But he could talk no more. "And he's such a fine boy! I don't see how you could----" "How I could disown him? Yesterday?" She nodded. "I can't understand that. I never could. I can't see how you could hesitate. I--I wish you hadn't. I--I can't forgive that." Her voice rose slightly at last, a spot of color came into her pallid cheek.