I needed some one in my life.

But I was just twenty, and Dorothy seemed so much more mature and wise than I.Then always there was this matter of Zoe.

I lived in the expectation that something would come out of Zoe's misfortune; and if it did my name was bound to be connected with it.

What would Dorothy say if in the midst of our engagement, if she engaged herself to me, the word should be brought to her that I was the father of Zoe's aborted child and that by some one, perhaps Mrs.Brown, Zoe had been saved the open shame of giving birth to the child and while an inmate of my house?
I could see the probative force of these facts against me.

This is what kept me from speaking to Dorothy on the subject of becoming my wife and having it settled before she went to Nashville.