"Mother, I will not have you talk like that. I have never doubted that you loved me. And I love you all the more for what you have endured for me. Yes, I knew you suffered—I always understood that."
"I suffered—but I have not yet told you the deepest cause. I must tell you that too."
"I don't want to know, mother. I have no right to know."
"Yes; it is your right to know."
There was anguish in her voice now. The yellow rays of the sinking moon, falling on her face, revealed a white, strained contour, as though flame and marble mingled.
"Listen, Arthur. I must go back through the years to the time when I married your father. I was young, gay, inexperienced, and as lighthearted as a girl could be. Your father had a greatness of his own—never think that I doubt that—and when I first met him I thought him the most wonderful man in all the world. No man was ever better calculated to impress the senses of a young girl. I gave him what was almost adoration, unthinking adoration. Of course I knew that I shared only one part of his life, but what did I care? Women are usually content if men love them; they do not care to ask what kind of life the men they trust live when they are away from them. Of the nature of your father's business life I could hardly form a guess. It was not my concern, and I was happy in my ignorance until—until a day came when I had to know.
"I will spare you details, Arthur. I have said enough when I say that the discovery I made was that your father's business was based on merciless chicanery and fraud. I begged him on my knees to alter it. I told him that I was willing to live anywhere, to do anything, to suffer any privation, rather than eat dishonest bread. At first he argued with me, as one might with a foolish child. He told me he was no worse than other people—all businesses were like that; he was as good as circumstances permitted; and he laughed at what he called my pretty Puritanism. Then, when he saw that I was in earnest, he grew angry.
"'Haven't I given you everything you possess?' he cried.
"'You shall give me no more,' I answered. 'You have taken from me much more than you gave.'
"'What have I taken?'