"Listen," he pleaded. "He was reared very differently from you. His father was a man of honor, true, but he had business interests that kept him long intervals from home. And his mother, I think, hardly gave him much thought when he was a child. She was a very beautiful woman with luxurious tastes. There was most always a gay company around her, and it could never have greatly concerned her how her husband’s money was made, so that she had it to spend. I will not say much about her,—she is gone, now, out of his life,—but the boy was taught early not to trouble her, and to look out for himself. I believe the only lessons she ever gave him were in quick, flippant retort, and to cover his hurts. He learned early, too, that the surest way to please her was to amuse her friends. Once, when he came into a room, unexpectedly, and conversation dropped, she looked at him, smiling, and said, ’Boy, what is disgrace?’ And he answered directly, ’Disgrace, mother, is being caught.’" "And she?" said Alice, after a moment. "She? Why, she laughed, I think, with the others, and tapped him on the shoulder with her fan; or perhaps that time she clapped her adorable hands." He rose to his feet and stood looking off to that dim British coast. A great weariness settled over his face. "You see, in the end, it amounted to this; he thought, when he thought at all, that wrong rested only in detection. One must make and leave a good impression, but right motive, sincerity, in his world did not count. Then things changed. He saw life differently, through the eyes of the woman he loves." Stratton’s voice vibrated a little on the word. He turned and looked down at her, and that quiver again swept his face. But she did not see it. Her glance rested thoughtfully on the white peak, eastward, across the channel. That reference to the boy’s mother, his training, home, struck the maternal chord, so strong in her, and she saw suddenly, clearly, the other side. The mountain began to flush with a sunset glow; a gentleness, almost tenderness, rose in her face. "She is not like the women he has always known," Stratton went on. "She walks a higher level. Sometimes, she is so much a saint, he is afraid of her. He dreads her judgment, and yet he dreads more to have a suspicion of the truth reach her, some day, through others. Lately there are rumors afloat touching those men, who made a tool of him, and any time, a chance word from one of them may involve him. What do you think, Miss Hunter? You see she is like you in some ways; she takes your Puritan view of life and has your habit of sifting things. In her place would you think better of him if he told you? Could you, yourself, forgive him if—you loved him?"