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 the letter. She was only a girl—but the sort of girl you could go to in a crisis like that. He had made up his mind to do the right thing, and she loved him all the more for it. And so they parted.

“When Tom reached ‘Pipeclay’, the girl’s relations, that she was stopping with, had a parson readied up, and they were married the same day.”

“And what happened after that?” asked Mitchell.

“Nothing happened for three or four months; then the child was born. It wasn’t his!”

Mitchell stood up with an oath.

“The girl was thoroughly bad. She’d been carrying on with God knows how many men, both before and after she trapped Tom.”

“And what did he do then?”

“Well, you know how the Oracle argues over things, and I suppose he was as big an old fool then as he is now. He thinks that, as most men would deceive women if they could, when one man gets caught, he’s got no call to squeal about it; he’s bound, because of the sins of men in general against women, to make the best of it. What is one man’s wrong counted against the wrongs of hundreds of unfortunate girls.

“It’s an uncommon way of arguing—like most of the Oracle’s ideas—but it seems to look all right at first sight.

“Perhaps he thought she’d go straight; perhaps she convinced him that he was the cause of her first fall; anyway he stuck to her for more than a year, and intended to take her away from that place as soon as he’d scraped enough money together. It