Then she confessed her secret, timorously at first, then eagerly, pleadingly. She told him of 'Gene Crawley's reformation, his kindness, his real nobility, expecting at the outset that Jud would be angry and displeased. But he was thinking of the future, not of the past or the present. After a moment or two of surprise and chagrin, he accepted her course in regard to Crawley as a natural condition, and, trusting her implicitly, found no fault with her action. He went so far as to credit Crawley with more manhood than he had suspected. A flood of joy enveloped her when she saw that he was reconciled; the weight of her only deception was lifted from her troubled heart. Already he was thinking of the ordeal ahead of him: the return to Celeste, the confession of his duplicity, his plea for forgiveness and leniency, and then the life of peace and solitude with Justine and the boy. He knew that Celeste's heart would be crushed, but it was the only way back to the path of honor. Justine should never know of his marriage to Celeste; that was the one thing the honest, virtuous country girl would not forgive. He even found himself, as he always was in emergencies, impatient to have the ordeal over, to know his fate, to give torture to one that he might be happy with the other. With the arms of the real wife about his neck, he trembled with the desire to be off to the side of the deceived one, there to unmask himself, to grovel at her feet and then to fly from the world. How he could face Celeste he knew not, but he must do it. There seemed no way to lighten the blow he must deal and there seemed no escape from it. He was a bigamist, a criminal. To leave her without an explanation would result in a tireless search, inspired by her love; the discovery of his duplicity by the police would mean conviction; even Celeste could not save him. Shrewdly he brought himself to believe that, though she could not forgive him, she would release him to avoid a scandal. He knew that he must play out to the end his role of the coward and the supplicant and the liar. It was only after the most persistent pleading that Justine induced him to remain with her through the night and the day following. She promised to keep his visit a secret, respecting his show of humiliation, and she vouched for the silence of Mrs. Crane who slept upstairs. And so the would-be murderer and suicide slept and dreamed and plotted for twenty-four hours in the house of his victim, slinking away on the night after, with her kisses on his lips, her voice in his ears, leaving behind brave promises and the vow to come back to her and the boy without murder in his heart. CHAPTER XXIII. THE TALE OF TEARS.