"That may be, brother," the girl had replied, "but I must marry him. You have always said one must learn his own lesson, not another's. I am ready to take the consequences. I could never get away from the sound of Lansing Hertford's voice. I hear him at night. He tells me that when temptation or weakness overpowers him he breathes my name. So, you see, dear, I cannot escape."
"Don't be a fool, Caroline!"
Markham struggled against the sense of impotency surging around him.
"It's my lesson, dear. I'll never wince."
And she never had, even when Hertford's indifference changed to cruelty. After the birth of her child, Caroline Hertford failed rapidly and the end of her lesson came when her boy was two years old. Markham and Matilda had desired to take the baby then, but Mrs. Olive Treadwell, Hertford's married sister, put in a protest.
"It would blight the boy's future if any gossip touched the dead mother or bereaved father; besides he is too young to change nurses or environment."
When little Lansing was seven his father died abroad under conditions shrouded with secrecy, and then it was that Olive Treadwell sought Levi Markham and by methods unknown to the simple, direct man, contrived to interest him in her nephew and his.
"There'll be a mighty big fortune some day for some one to inherit—why not Lans?" she argued to herself and began her campaign. She had grown to love the boy in her vain, worldly way; she wanted him and the Markham money, and she cautiously felt her way through the years while the child was with her.
"I hear my nephew is called by your name," Levi remarked once during a call at the Boston home of the Treadwells.
"Just a childish happening. You know how simple little minds are; having no mother but me, he calls me mommy, and naturally people speak of him carelessly by my name."