"Ah, Luttra if you love me as I do you--" "I might perhaps yield," she allowed with a faint smile.

"But I love you as a girl brought up amid surroundings from which her whole being recoiled, must love the one who first brought light into her darkness and opened up to her longing feet the way to a life of culture, purity and honor.

I were the basest of women could I consent to repay such a boundless favor--" "But Luttra," he again broke in, "you married me knowing what your father and brother were capable of committing." "Yes, yes; I was blinded by passion, a girl's passion, Mr.Blake, born of glamour and gratitude; not the self-forgetting devotion of a woman who has tasted the bitterness of life and so learned its lesson of sacrifice.

I may not have thought, certainly I did not realize, what I was doing.

Besides, my father and brother were not convicted criminals at that time, however weak they had proved themselves under temptation.
And then I believed I had left them behind me on the road of life; that we were sundered, irrevocably cut loose from all possible connection.
But such ties are not to be snapped so easily.