In the heart of Julia Cavendish--those earliest days--was neither hatred nor cruelty; only a terrible numbness as from a blow.

Ronnie, her own son, had struck her! At first she could not bring herself to believe the happening real. His letter, read and reread, conveyed nothing.

But soon the letter grew real enough--so real that Julia's imagination, peering between the lines, could actually see him with the woman who had inspired it; with the woman who had ruined her boy's career.

Her first impulse was to go to them, to go swiftly; to say to the woman, "It's not too late--even now. Return to your husband--give my son back to me."

Yet every traditional instinct in Julia fought against that solution. All her life she had schooled herself to the belief that adultery--in a woman--was the unforgivable sin. Men, of course, were never guilty of "adultery," only of "lapses." Modern society, so pitifully lax, so given over to the sentimental impulse, might forgive both parties. Julia Cavendish could not. She, in her eugenic wisdom, knew that individual sin--in a woman--must earn individual punishment. Mrs. Brunton, therefore, could not return to her husband. But if Mrs. Brunton did not return, how could Mrs. Brunton give back Ronnie?

Mrs. Brunton probably took the ordinary tolerant view about divorce; the view that she, Julia, had spent a lifetime in combating. Not that her own public position on the divorce question counted! At any moment since Ronnie's birth she would have sacrificed more than public position for him. But this, this was a question of beliefs. Love might urge forgiveness but how could love countenance sin--a deadly sin?

For a week that stubborn old doctrine of deadly sin, which Julia had imbibed with a bookish Christianity--the same bookish "Christianity" which still tolerates the ghastly word "heretic," continued to harden her heart as it blinded her intellect; for a week she held on, with a tenacity almost Hebraic, to the fixed idea of the woman taken in adultery.

Then, as the numbness of the blow warmed into pain, her heart softened, and her intellect--momentarily freed by sorrow from the blindness of all formal faiths--saw a ray of light.

Admit, just for argument's sake, that a husband was entitled to put away his guilty wife; and suppose that the guilty man were willing to marry her. What then? Could one doom the guilty parties to a perpetual living in sin?

But the ray of light petered out, leaving her in even blacker darkness, because--by the beam of it--she had seen herself already drifted so far away from her old beliefs as to countenance not only divorce but the remarriage of divorced parties.

All the same, mother-love still urged her to forgive: so that, for a full week, she went about her house (a lonely house, it seemed now; all the charm of the years gone out of it) in a positive stupor of intellectual and religious bewilderment. She asked herself: "Does anything matter except my boy's happiness, my boy's career? Does anything really count except love? Isn't love--and love alone--the true teaching of Christianity!" But she found no answer to her questions. Honesty said: "It's a matter of principle; judge the case as though it were a stranger's, not the case of your own son."

Nevertheless the argument of the individual case persisted. Memory recalled her son's statement about Aliette's relationship to her husband. If those two--the woman to whom she had taken such an instinctive liking and the man she had deemed, at first sight, capable of cruelty--were husband and wife only in name, didn't the case alter? "No!" said formal religion. "Yes!" said the mother in Julia Cavendish.

She remembered a phrase of Aliette's: "I have no children, worse luck." That was hardly the phrase of a loose woman, of a harpy. Suppose this woman really loved Ronnie?

But that brought back the old jealousy. How could Aliette really love Ronnie? She, his mother, would have held her right hand in the flames rather than jeopardize her son's career--as Aliette had jeopardized it.

Whereupon the novelist's imagination in Julia started to activity. She pictured--knowing little of the law--a crowd of clients besieging Ronnie's chambers, only to be told that "the eminent Mr. Cavendish" could not take their cases; and--thoroughly frightened at the heroic version of Benjamin Bunce and those few dusty briefs which Ronald had abandoned--sent for her secretary, the blank-faced Mrs. Sanderson, whom she told to ring up Sir Peter Wilberforce.

But Sir Peter was in Paris; and James deputized in his stead.

"Do you know what she wants to see him about?" asked James's secretary on the telephone.

"It's about her will, I think," answered Julia's.