And that mettle was of a kind worth while. In these hours of
grief, the soul of him put out its strength. He learned beyond
peradventure of doubt that the woman whom he had married was in
truth an ex-convict, even as Burke and Demarest had declared.
Nevertheless, he did not for an instant believe that she was
guilty of the crime with which she had been originally charged
and for which she had served a sentence in prison. For the rest,
he could understand in some degree how the venom of the wrong
inflicted on her had poisoned her nature through the years, till
she had worked out its evil through the scheme of which he was
the innocent victim. He cared little for the fact that recently
she had devoted herself to devious devices for making money, to
ingenious schemes for legal plunder. In his summing of her, he
set as more than an offset to her unrighteousness in this regard
the desperate struggle she had made after leaving prison to keep
straight, which, as he learned, had ended in her attempt at
suicide. He knew the intelligence of this woman whom he loved,
and in his heart was no thought of her faults as vital flaws.
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