---

It was like the home-coming of a national hero. The college paper and the little local daily had announced that Miss Eileen Trench had played at a private audience with the King of Belgium—the paragraph inspired by her mother, when one of the letters from Brussels brought the humorous announcement that His Majesty had stopped his motor car in front of her window while she was practicing a brilliant Chopin number.

Judith thought the crowd was at the station as a tribute to Lary’s recent triumphs. And Lary thought, bitterly, that his New York success had won him the plaudits of his native town. Theodora told them both the truth, on the way home. She was afraid too much adulation would turn Eileen’s head.

At first they did not miss David in the throng. A year ago he and Theodora had stood alone on the little station platform. Judith knew why he was not there now. Eileen knew, too, and her eyes darkened with suffering. He was at the gate as they approached. Lary caught his breath sharply, as he took in the shrunken figure and the mournful eyes. Eileen leaped from the cab and ran to greet him.

“Papa, darling!”

He looked at her as one awakening from deep sleep. Then all at once the smile broke ... it spread, like ripples on the surface of a placid pool. Every emotion of his heart was recorded on that transparent face. The blue eyes beamed with incredible joy, as he held out his arms.

“It’s my little girl. I thought I had lost you.”

“No, daddy dear, it’s only that I have found myself.”

Lavinia hurried into the house. She could not bear such spectacles in public. What would the neighbours think?

II

The following day an astounding thing came to pass. The president of the college and the dean of the musical faculty called on Miss Trench. They wanted to offer her a position in the conservatory. Naturally it could not be an actual professorship. A seventeen-year-old girl ... without a degree. They thought she might give recitals in the neighbouring towns, and take pupils in advanced technique. It would mean much to the college to announce an instructor who had studied with the great Ysaye. No one need know how young she was. Indeed she was altogether different from the immature girl they remembered—quite dignified and impressive. Marvellously changed.

“If they knew what changed her,” Mrs. Trench reflected, her gorge rising, “they wouldn’t be flattering her this way.” It was a mistake to tell that about the King of Belgium. She hadn’t thought about the effect on Eileen. Of late she blundered at every turn. Somehow things were slipping out of her grasp.

After they had gone, Eileen ran breathless to Vine Cottage to tell Judith. She could not contemplate any step without that guidance or approval.

“Lary will be pleased. This will put an end to your mother’s plan of having you enter the freshman class next Monday. But ... Eileen, I have an idea. You are not going to stop studying. I wonder if you and I couldn’t—I’m a horribly uneducated person.”

“With Lary for tutor, you mean? Well, in the first place, my brother’s no salesman when it comes to the things he knows. He can lay them out on the counter and let you pick what you want. What I want most is Latin. And he thinks it is bald and plebeian, compared with Greek. Syd reads Horace, in the original, to rest him when he’s tired and can’t get his mind off of the sick babies and their fool mothers. I’m crazy to translate Ovid and—”

“Syd’s just the thing. Don’t tell Lary, but I foundered on the Greek alphabet. It simply wouldn’t stick in my memory. I substituted organic chemistry. My classicist husband would be disgusted.”

“Lary’s a prig—and I love him! Judith, it was worth it—just to get acquainted with my brother.”

III

From Vine Cottage she went to the office for David’s stamp of approval. She had once called her father a rubber stamp. She thought of it now, with stinging chagrin. Would not he serve as her anchor, as Judith had been her pilot? Had she anything to fear? As she walked past the clump of shrubbery on the campus, where Hal Marksley had kissed her that first time, she thought with a thrill of exultation that her craft had outrun the storm.

From her father’s arms she hurried to Dr. Schubert’s office to tell the joyful and as yet half apprehended news. And the man who had heard her first shrill cry of protest against the life that was not of her choosing, drew her to him and kissed her. The act was paternal. She had always been more at home with him than with those of her own blood.

“Poor old Syd,” she beamed, “he doesn’t know what he’s in for.” And Sydney, coming through the laboratory door with a microscope slide in one hand and a bottle of red colouring fluid in the other, put up his mouth for the customary salutation.

“No more of that, old fellow. I’m a young lady now. Besides you’re going to be my preceptor, and it’s bad form for the dominie to kiss his pupils. You’re to teach Judith and me, and you couldn’t bestow osculations on one and not on the other. Now could you?”

“I should think Judith would be lovely to kiss.”

“She is ... but you and Lary can’t go out in the alley and fight duels. And while we are on the subject—you and Papa Schubert are ages behind the times—with all your X-rays and bacteriological tests. In Europe they have decided that kissing is unsanitary. Disease germs are carried that way.”

“Yes,” the elder assented, “the dangerous little amorococcus is usually conveyed from lip to lip.”

Syd changed the subject. He had never been seriously touched by love. But he thought the shaft of his father’s playful humour might carry a poisoned barb for the girl. He demanded, with a grimace:

“Why don’t you take me into your confidence about the preceptorship? What do you need to learn ... after Brussels and Paris?”

“We had thought about Latin—and anything else you happen to have in your system that would help us to shine as intellectuals. But, seriously, Syd, I want you to do one thing for me. Get this teaching idea across to me. You remember how you gave me the legato—when Prexie Irwin was making us whack the strings with the bow—everything jumpy staccato, don’t you remember? And how you showed me, in five minutes, how to produce the singing tones? I know how to do it; but you’ll have to show me how to teach the other fellow.”

IV

When the door had closed behind her, Dr. Schubert said jubilantly:

“The child isn’t spoiled a bit. I’ve been afraid she’d come home sophisticated and world-wise. She’s just an innocent girl, in spite of her long skirts.”

“Yes,” Sydney said, with a catch in his throat, “she’s as pure and fair as a May morning—and the fairest mornings are always the ones that follow the darkest nights. Father, couldn’t you trump up some excuse to bring her here to stay with us ... keep her away from her mother as much as possible?”

“Curious, Syd, but I was going to speak to you about that very thing. David came to me, when he knew Eileen was coming home and asked me—oh, it was tough for him to do it. He’s so damnably loyal! Don’t you think we could fit up the room next to Nanny’s, so that the child could sleep here, the nights when she’s going to have early classes at the college? It’s a shame to deprive David of even that much of her company. But we’ll make it up to him in ways his wife doesn’t suspect—if we can inject enough guile into him to enable him to play his part without fumbling. He feels that she must, must be kept away from her mother.”

“What is the trouble with David?” Syd asked abruptly. “You’ve doped him on tonics all summer, and he doesn’t improve in the least.”

“The climacteric—and his wife’s merciless tongue. David is approaching fifty. A man’s mental and physical being undergoes a subtle change in that year. It’s not so crucial as the grand climacteric—the transformation from manhood to age—that comes at sixty-three. You young doctors will be telling us that it is an exploded theory; but I have followed it for forty years. To a sensitive chap like David Trench, it’s serious. Just this year, when he ought to be coddled and petted, his wife seasons his food with gall and puts a dash of aqua fortis in his tea.

“I’ve ordered him to sleep in a room by himself, with the door locked, so that she couldn’t wake him up with her nagging and upbraiding. I told her, point-blank, that she was killing him—and she did what I might have expected.”

“Yes, she ‘slipped from under’ by writing Lary that she was being terribly set upon by his father, and it was his duty to come home. Father”—Syd’s blue eyes blazed—“why didn’t David take a riding whip to his wife the first time she—”

The man who could look beneath sex interrupted with an impatient gesture.

“David is a woman. More than that, Sydney, Mrs. Trench is a man—trapped in a woman’s body. When nature makes a blunder like that, there’s usually the devil to pay. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact—or I’d be in danger of poisoning Lavinia Trench.”

---

Autumn was on the threshold of winter when Lavinia decided that things had to take a turn. Eileen was spending three mornings a week at the college, which necessitated her absence from home practically half the time. She was uniformly polite and gentle with her mother, an attitude that was not wholly the result of Judith’s stern schooling. Under the whip of her own discipline, she sought to round off the rough corners, to modulate her voice and temper her diction. Her outbursts of picturesque speech were reserved for Dr. Schubert and Syd, with Nanny in the background, shaking her ample sides with adoring laughter. Now there would be a fortnightly concert trip, and some elective work in the academic department, which promised further separation from the chilly atmosphere of her home.

“Judith, I want to have a talk with you,” Mrs. Trench began, and the stern set of her jaw left no doubt that the interview would be unpleasant. “I don’t like the way Eileen is acting.”

“Every one else does.” Judith sought to be impersonal. She had been expecting some such outburst and had framed a line of defence, against a possible attack.

“That’s just it! Everybody in Springdale thinks she has done something fine in going away to New York and Europe, and coming back here to teach in the college before she’s even been a student. You are making a rank hypocrite of her.”“I?”

“Yes, you—who else but you? You did the whole thing. I am sure Larimore is as disgusted as I am; but he doesn’t dare to say—”

“We won’t discuss my relations with my husband.”

Lavinia’s face flamed scarlet and she tugged at the collar of her elaborate silk waist. But speech was not wanting, for more than the fraction of a second.

“Well, I want to know what other wild-goose schemes you have for her.”

Judith shifted impatiently in her chair. “You have a grievance. I wish you would be specific. Eileen is surely not causing you any anxiety. She is growing into a beautiful young woman and she has the respect of the entire community.”

“Respect! Yes!” The words crackled. “The whole town respects her. You can’t see what that means. You have no religion and no moral sense of your own. For a girl to do what she did—and then walk right back here into a position that she never would have had, if she’d been a good girl, is a positive slur on religion.”

Judith gasped. She wanted to laugh—to take her mother-in-law by the shoulders and shake her. But Lavinia had not done speaking:

“It says in the Bible—”

“It says a good many things in the Bible. You take from it what appeals to you—and shape your religion to suit your own needs.”

Lavinia was not slow to catch an idea that could be stopped by the mesh of her mental net. Her son’s philosophy usually passed through without leaving a fragment. But this idea was large enough to be arrested. Two facts conspired to give it substance and form. For his Sunday sermon, the minister had combined a passage from Isaiah with another from the Epistle to the Hebrews. And—wholly unrelated, but subtly significant—Lavinia had just finished an elaborate gelatine dessert for dinner.

“You mean that we pick from the Bible what we want and fit it together.”

“Practically that. We can’t get anything out of a book unless we have in our own minds the vessels to carry away the meaning. A cult or a religion is nothing more than the solidifying of a group of ideas. The Christian religion—”

“Like lemon jelly in a mould,” the woman said, thinking aloud. Then, arousing herself to the business at hand, she pursued: “That may be all true enough about religion; but it has nothing to do with Eileen, and the way she’s acting.”

“I asked you to be definite. What has she done that displeased you?”

“Staying at Dr. Schubert’s, three nights in the week—with no woman there except a housekeeper. What will the neighbours say?”

“Have you heard them say anything?”

“No, but they’re likely to. I’m sure I’d think it was queer if Ina Stevens—”

“I wouldn’t suggest it to them. And another thing—I wouldn’t say a word to Eileen—if I were you. She is doing so well that it would break Lary’s heart to have her thrown back on the old life. There is only one danger, as he sees it. She has a strong vein of stubbornness in her nature.”

“Yes, she gets that from her father,” Lavinia snapped.

“No, she doesn’t get it from her father. There is no obstinacy in father, except his stubborn clinging to his ideals. You can’t deal with Eileen as you did with Sylvia, and you’ll play havoc with her if you try.”

“No! Sylvia never caused me a moment’s anxiety in her life.”

Judith ignored the palpable falsehood. “You must know that Eileen couldn’t have finer moral influence than that of Dr. Schubert and his son. And my faithful Nanny is no ordinary servant. She was more to me than my own mother, when I was a girl.”

The innocent remark was flint and steel, with Lavinia’s powder heap in dangerous proximity. “I suppose your mother was delighted with that. But of course she was a rich woman, and glad to be rid of the moral training of her children. I can say for myself that I never shirked my duty—and I don’t intend to hand it over to you or Nanny or Dr. Schubert now. I made up my mind that I wouldn’t say a word about this; but it’s grinding my heart out. I can’t stand it any longer.”

“Mother, I don’t follow you at all. I asked you to be frank with me.”

“Very well, I’ll put it so plain that you can’t pretend you don’t understand. How would you feel if you had a daughter, and some stranger came along and took that girl’s life clear out of your hands? I haven’t a word to say about her. She runs to you for all sorts of things—clothes—as if I wouldn’t know what was stylish or becoming. If she’s in doubt about what to do, she talks it over with Larimore or Syd. When anything comes along to make her proud, she tells her father. She talks to Theodora by the hour about the things she saw when she was abroad—and she never tells me one thing. I’m simply shut out on every side, and it’s killing me!” She burst into hysterical weeping.

“I’m so sorry, mother. I hadn’t realized. Perhaps if you weren’t always so short and critical with her—”“Oh, I’m to go down on my knees to her? Indeed I won’t. As long as she is under eighteen, she takes her orders from me. She’ll go to the dogs, with all this flattery and praise—”

“The surest way to ruin Eileen is to take that attitude towards her.”

“Well, she is my child, and I have a right to do with her as I please.”

“No—you—have—not!” Judith’s eyes flashed and her voice was hoarse with indignation. “Rather than permit you to wreck her chance for happiness, I’ll send her to Laura Ramsay—or even to my mother.”

II

Lavinia fled weeping through the door. She would tell Larimore how his wife had insulted her. Unfortunately he was in New York. At least she could write to him ... and the letter had distinct advantages. She would be spared interruption. Larimore always broke the point of her lance before she had time to drive it home. She wrote. She read the long letter through twice—and tore it into shreds. A second letter followed the first one. Then it was time to go down to luncheon.

When the noonday meal was over, and David and Theo had gone, she went again to Vine Cottage. Judith was in the library, an open volume of Browning on the table before her. Her face was pale and her eyes showed flecks of hazel.

“We had a misunderstanding this morning, my dear, and I don’t want to leave things that way.” The words came with a brave show of confidence, but Lavinia Trench looked like a corpse, an automaton that was made to speak by a force other than its own. “I am going to ask you to forgive me, and help me as you did Eileen.”“Oh, mother!” The cry was from her heart.

“I knew you would be surprised. I never apologized to any one in my life. I’ve been fighting it for a week. When I said those things, this morning, it was to keep from saying what—what I’m going to say now. Since Eileen came home, I’ve been going over my life. David said she had missed the path, and you showed her the right way. I am the most unhappy woman in the world. If you could do that for Eileen, you could do it for me.”

It was a challenge, flung like a pelting of hail stones. Judith looked at her with troubled gaze. How could she deal with a mentality so different from her own? Eileen was young, and Eileen loved her. That her mother-in-law cordially detested her, she could not doubt.

“You know I would gladly....”

“It’s all perfectly simple—excepting two points. By all the rules of right and wrong, Eileen ought to be a miserable girl, broken in soul and body—and not respected by good people. It doesn’t make a particle of difference that she hid her wickedness. God knows what she did, and it is God that punishes sin. Instead of that, she comes back here better in every way than she was before. She’s prettier now than Sylvia. She used to be cross and hateful most of the time. Now she laughs and sings and whistles till I wish she would pout for a change. She sits up and discusses the most serious topics with grown men and women—and you know how she used to rattle slang, and sneer at people who were serious.”

“Her experience developed her marvellously. It might have wrecked her, just as a powerful dose of medicine might destroy your body, if administered in the wrong way. It was fearful medicine, but it was what her sick mind needed.”“That takes care of one of the points,” Lavinia cried, her black eyes dilating. “You call it medicine. I saw it only as the consequences of sin.”

“The name doesn’t matter.”

“Yes, the name does matter. I want to get this thing down in black and white. All my life I have been discontented. It’s just one crushing disappointment after another. Eileen was the same way. I never used to think she was like me—but in some respects she is. I had a chance to marry the son of the richest man in town. But I have always been virtuous and upright—”

“Mother, perhaps if you—”

“Don’t interrupt me. I have to say this all at once, while it’s connected. You call Eileen’s discontentment and rebellious nature a kind of disease. Well then, I had the same disease, and she got it from me. After my grandmother died, there wasn’t one in the family that understood me. And the man I was engaged to—” She brought her teeth together, as if she were biting off and forcing back the words that strove to assert themselves in spite of her. “I threw him over, when I found out that he was an unprincipled scoundrel, like Hal Marksley. If I had gone on, as she did—but I never could have done such a thing.”

“Probably not. You were brought up in a provincial New York town. You were hedged about by customs and convictions that don’t obtain in Springdale, or among Eileen’s associates. You must make allowance for that.”

Lavinia sidestepped the interruption. “Eileen was sick—and God picked out a remedy that I thought God, in His purity, wouldn’t know anything about. I was taught that it was the devil that—well, I’ve been figuring that she had to come to grief, because she went over to Satan. That’s the only way I could square things with my religious training. I don’t believe, now, that she will ever be punished. That shows that it was God and not the devil that did it. I’m willing to admit that I was mistaken, if you’ll show me how to find happiness.”

“It isn’t a recipe, like the ingredients for a cake. And you must remember that I didn’t prescribe the remedy, in Eileen’s case. I only nursed her, after she had taken it. I haven’t the faintest idea why you are unhappy.”

“And I would have to tell you the whole story?”

“I wouldn’t pry into your heart. I would do anything in my power to give you peace. You are Lary’s mother. I have never overlooked my obligation to you.”

III

Lavinia took from the words an implication more humiliating than her daughter-in-law had intended. But this was no time for recrimination. She must hold on to herself. The canker in her heart had eaten so deep that help must come, or she would go mad. Mechanically she reached for the volume on the table. Her mind went back to those first years in Springdale, when she had conned Browning in an effort to shine in Mrs. Henderson’s club. Was it indeed for this that she had memorized poems, delved in abstruse literary criticism—that she might win Mrs. Henderson’s approbation? One half of her knew that it was not, while the other half as stoutly denied an ulterior motive for this, or for any other deliberate act of her life.

While she was giving the attic its annual overhauling, she had come upon the yellow files of the Bromfield Sentinel, the edges broken like pie crust. She had read again the spirited account of the meeting at which Mrs. David Trench was elected secretary of the most intellectual club in Springdale. Who was there in her girlhood home for whom this triumph would provide a thrill of gratification or a sting of envy? Ellen knew all about it. Isabel had long since removed to California. Her mother was dead. The girls of her social circle? The Browning craze had not invaded Bromfield, and there was not one among her old friends for whose opinion she cared a straw.

IV

She came back to herself with a start. “The Statue and the Bust,” she muttered. “We did that one, the winter before Isabel was born. I had to drop out—and Mrs. Henderson sent me her notes. It was a shockingly immoral thing, for the wife of a college president—a Presbyterian minister, at that. I never had quite the same opinion of her, after I read those notes. She said the lady who sat at the window and watched for the duke to ride by—would have been less wicked if she had actually run away with him. She said it was just as bad to want to commit sin as to actually commit it—”

“Yes, if they restrained themselves only because of fear of the consequences. There is no virtue in that kind of repression.”

To Lavinia Trench everything was personal. She turned the thought over in her mind ... “afraid of the consequences” ... “no virtue in that kind of repression.” Her whole life had been one of repression. Mrs. Henderson had stressed the lines:

“That isn’t my idea of sin. At least it wasn’t, until....” She trailed off into incoherence, thumbing the pages nervously. “Judith, do you think a woman—a married woman—could go on caring for some other man—” She struggled with the obstruction in her throat. “I mean the bride of Riccardi, in the poem. I can’t see how caring, and just thinking how much she would like to be with him—was—wrong. She didn’t commit any act of sin—didn’t break the seventh commandment.”

“In the eyes of the world she was a virtuous woman. In her own heart she was an unsatisfied wanton. She added hypocrisy to the sin of desire, and on that hypocrisy she wrecked her only chance for happiness.”

V

Once before, Judith had attempted to implant an abstract idea in Mrs. Trench’s mind. Now she was betrayed into a discussion of moral responsibility, with no intent other than that of bridging over a trying period of her none too comfortable relations with her mother-in-law. That Lavinia would carry away even a germ of an idea, she did not suspect. She had merely reiterated what Mrs. Henderson had said, twenty years ago. As yet she had not fully perceived, in that warped mind, one dominating characteristic: the ability to find justification for anything that seemed desirable. True, Eileen had said—but Eileen was not always fair in her old-time strictures on her mother.

Judith looked at the abject figure, the pallid face and the hard mouth ... and pity overmastered her. She wanted to say something comforting. The door was shut, the discussion ended. Lavinia sat there, pondering. It was all so different from the groundwork of her religious training. Probably Browning and Judith and Mrs. Henderson were wrong. To her literal mind, their idea could not accord with the stern dictum: “The wages of sin is death.” Still, their theory would serve to explain Eileen. In her pondering, she went the length of formulating the postulate: “Eileen sinned and became happy. Her sin was the source of her regeneration.”

There must be something to it. She, Vine Larimore, had been virtuous—and disaster had overtaken her. Lettie Fournier had sinned ... and for all the years of her subsequent life she had worn the name of Calvin Stone. That this distinction brought her rival scant happiness, was beside the point. The transgression of the moral law was the barrier which both Lettie and Eileen had passed to the kind of satisfaction that had been denied her. Judith had not told her of the days and nights of self-purging. She saw only externals, and these were all in favour of the Browning theory. After a long interval she said:

“Would you mind telling her—Eileen—that I want her to come to me? You know better how to get hold of her. She thinks I don’t love her—that I’m partial to Sylvia. I do love her ... and I want her at home with me, where I can study her. It will be bitter enough dose for me to take my lesson from her. But I am willing to do it, if she can show me the way to happiness.” She looked incredibly old and tired and hopeless. “And would you mind lending me your copy of Browning? I want to read ‘The Statue and the Bust’ through. Sylvia took mine with her when she moved to Detroit. I didn’t think I would ever look at it again.”

---

“Sister Judy,” Jack Denslow called, “there’s a bully fire down the avenue. Come and watch the motor engine go by. Good-bye, old horse, your day is done.”

Judith Trench crossed to the window and stood beside her young brother; but her mind was not on the marvel of metal and speed that had gone from sight almost before its clanging bell-note reached her ears. Another fifth of March. A year ago ... Eileen ... there, in that very room. And now.... Did Eileen remember? Did any of the family remember? She and Lary had spent the winter in New York, going to Springdale only when business demanded, and each brief visit brought its fresh surprise.

With the Marksley contract off his hands, David improved in health so rapidly that he had long since ceased to be a source of anxiety. Eileen and her mother had effected an entente cordiale which apparently worked well for both. The woman who had wrought the bridge, however frail and inadequate, over which mother and daughter might pass to an understanding hitherto unknown in their association, reflected with grave misgivings that the bridge was not the end of the journey.

Once she was on the point of telling Lary about his mother, their sharp dispute and the subsequent ethical discussion. The change in Lavinia, since that day, was so marked that the neighbours made comment. The woman who had spent her mature years surging from officious sweetness to the most violent outbursts of temper, went about in a state of tranquil meditation that could not be accounted for by anything external to herself. There was none of the rapturous devotion to David that had characterized her return from Bromfield; but at least she was not unkind. Of all those who watched her, only Judith could surmise what was going on in her mind. Might it be that Lavinia had achieved her Indian Summer without the killing frost? Had there, perhaps, been a revision of her credo from the simple tenets of the catechism to the complex philosophy of Robert Browning? Judith shivered as she faced the thought and its possible consequences.

She had told the troubled woman that sin consisted, not in action, but in desire. Could Lavinia, literal-minded and creed-ridden, handle a concept so foreign to her convictions? Had Lary’s mother torn away the solid foundation of her existence, and was she building again—a substructure that would sustain her through the barren years to come? Could this be done, at Lavinia’s age and with the rigid material of Lavinia’s soul? Would the house of her being come crashing down, when she sought to shift from what she had been to what she hoped to be?

Judith was glad when Lary told her, that evening, that he must return to Springdale. Her mother-in-law might seek counsel of her, in the privacy of the library where their two natures had clashed again and yet again. All the tedious journey to the West, she turned over in her mind a working corollary to that elusive proposition, the nature of sin. How tenuous, how like shifting sand, the thought-mass on which our concrete actions must rest! Had she any assurance that her conception of duty, of principle, of right-thinking, was better for humanity than the set of fatuous concepts she had sought to displace?

II

If Lavinia had need of help, she gave no token. She was at the station to meet them, and she was bursting with a secret. There had been no mention of it in her letters, because one could not be sure about such things—and telling them in advance was likely to spoil the charm. Then she sealed her lips until they were well within the discreet walls of Vine Cottage.

“Of course I may be mistaken; but unless I miss my guess, there’s going to be a wedding before you go back to New York.”

“A wedding? Some one I have met?”

“There! I was sure you didn’t suspect. Though how you could have helped it—the way Syd acted, when you were here the end of January—”

“Dear old Syd! I hope he has fallen in love wisely. It would go hard with him if he should blunder.”

“I’m sure it will be all right. The difference in age doesn’t matter—and you know he will make her a noble husband. If only she doesn’t get some foolish notion of telling him all that wretched affair. I tried to caution her, in a roundabout way; but you know how stubborn Eileen is.”

“Eileen!” Judith dropped a handful of toilet articles on the dressing table and sat down, weakly.

“Mercy, Judith!” The woman’s tone carried positive contempt for such obtuseness. “He was with her every evening while you and Larimore were here, the last time. Of course they were reading Latin together, or working with the violin. But I knew what it would lead to. And it was my making her come home, after she’d been at their house three evenings a week, that did it. He missed her so dreadfully that he got over thinking about her as a little girl. Goodness knows, she’s more mature than Sylvia was at twenty—and Syd will always be a boy.”

“Has she told you?”

“No, but I wouldn’t look for her to do that. She’s been very nice to me. Oh, Judith, I hope she will tell you it’s true.”

“I’m sure it would be a great comfort to you to have her happily married.”

“Yes—but I wasn’t thinking so much about that part of it. I had my own case in mind. It would be the last straw of evidence—that all my old ideas were wrong. For the first time in my life, I want to be sure I was in the wrong.”

Her eyes glittered and her slender form seemed to dilate. She was not thinking of her cruelty to Eileen and her subsequent reluctance to admit that in her daughter’s case good might grow out of evil. Eileen was become, in her mother’s eyes, a manikin, to be posed this way and that for the studying of effects—an architect’s drawing, to serve as a pattern for the rebuilding of her mother’s life.

III

Later in the day the girl came, her face wearing an expression of deadly earnest. Already Mrs. Trench’s hope was transformed into certainty. Judith led the way to the little boudoir Lary had fitted for her on the second floor.

“Now, dear, what is it?” she asked when the door was shut.

“The most important trouble I ever had. I ought to have written you—when Syd first asked me. But I did so want to tell papa first ... before even you. I owe him that, for all the pain I caused him. Syd wants to be married on my eighteenth birthday, and that’s less than three weeks off.”

“And you love him, Eileen?”

“As I never thought it would be possible to love. We just belong together—like you and Lary, only, oh, so different. I can see it in a hundred ways. When I don’t get what he’s trying to tell me—abstract ideas, you know—he goes up to the landing in the reception hall and sits down at his mother’s pipe organ and puts the thought into something that I can get hold of. When a man can talk to you that way—and music is the only language you really do understand—there is only one answer. If I’m in an ugly mood, he doesn’t scold or upbraid me. He works out a theme in A-minor. I try to run away from it, and I can’t. I’ve made bold to go past him, up to my room, and my feet wouldn’t carry me up the stairs.”

“And then, Eileen?”

“I cry it out on his shoulder. After I have washed the meanness out, we can talk sense. I don’t mind in the least—that he’s always right.”

“And there’s one point on which you can’t come to an agreement?”

“Yes, only one. Judith, how far is it necessary to go with confession of something that you know will lose you the respect and affection of—”

“Oh, Eileen, my poor little sister!”

“Don’t let it hurt you,” the girl cried, her eyes filling. “If life isn’t so perfect, I can stand it. There is one thing more important than the man you love—and that is your conviction of what is square and honest. Syd can tell me what to do in other matters—but this is in your line, not his.”

“Dearest, it seems to me that there can be no sure foothold in marriage if a wife conceals from her husband an experience as important as that. I know what a humiliation it is to open such a secret chamber. I did it, Eileen.”

“Judith, you don’t think I—” She stared, aghast. “You couldn’t think me capable of taking Sydney Schubert’s love—a man as clean and honourable as he is—without telling him why I went to New York?”

“Then he knows?”

“He knew ... all along.” Her fair cheeks flamed. “When he told me he cared, I said there was a reason why I couldn’t ever marry any decent man. Judith, he put his two arms around me and looked me square in the eyes, and said: ‘You were a poor little wilful child, and you didn’t know that fire would burn. Any woman, my dear, is good enough for any man—if she is honest.’ The only thing he wanted to know was ... what we had done with it. He said that would make a difference. He was relieved when I told him. And he thinks you were made in heaven—to have saved me—for him.”

“But if you have told him, and he is satisfied—what is the obstacle?”

“It is his father. I can’t marry Syd and go there to live, letting Papa Schubert believe I am the pure white flower he thinks me. Syd says he won’t have his father’s ideal of me shattered—because his father wouldn’t look at it the way he does. He might forgive me: but I’d always be tarnished, to him.”

“Do you remember, Eileen, the day you told the truth to Laura Ramsay? You began by saying you were under no moral obligation to her mother. I don’t know how we can draw those lines of distinction; but I feel them with absolute certainty. You are under no need to confess your secret to Sylvia or Theodora—and for widely different reasons. Indeed we must go to any length to prevent Theo ever learning the truth. With Dr. Schubert it is the same. It would only give him useless pain.”

“That’s what Syd said. He led me over to that little peachblow vase—the one that was bequeathed to his father by one of his grateful patients. He told me the satin glaze and the peachbloom tints were the result of the heat in the kiln, that almost destroyed the body of the vase. He asked me if I would be willing to break that little amphora, that his father loves, just to prove to him that it isn’t as perfect on the inside as it looks to him. He might patch the fragments together, but he would always be conscious of the cracks.”

“Syd is right. It would be brutality—sheer vandalism.”

“You precious treasure. He told me that was what you would say. Now I am going to the office to tell my darling daddy that he is to have a real son-in-law.”

“When are you going to tell your mother, dear?”

“That’s Syd’s job. He is going to make formal application for my hand. He can get off a thing like that, without batting an eye, when he’s just dying to get out and yell. And the worst of it is, mamma’ll take it in dead earnest. I suppose Sylvia will have sarcastic things to say. I don’t care. Syd never was really in love with her—after he was old enough to cut his eye teeth.”

IV

Mrs. Penrose did not come home for the wedding. Just what she wrote her mother, the other members of the family never knew. Her letter came with another, which bore the Bromfield postmark, and the two were on Lavinia’s plate when she came down to breakfast. David and the girls were already at the table, and Theo had inspected the mail. Drusilla had been instructed not to take letters from the box, and the sight of two thick envelopes threw Lavinia into a nervous chill. She picked them up and carried them to the sun room, saying she had a headache and would eat nothing.

After a little, David followed her, distressed. “Is there anything wrong in Bromfield—at your brother’s house, or with my people?”

“There’s nothing the matter in Bromfield. Sylvia is a cat!”

---

When school closed in June, Judith took Theodora for the long promised visit to New York. Sydney and Eileen were off for a belated honeymoon in the mountains of Colorado, and Lavinia Trench reflected that the coveted privacy had come at the crucial moment. She would be alone to think things out. David was away from home much of the time, and when he was in the house his wife was only mechanically conscious of his presence. She viewed the neighbours as through a mist. Orders were given to Drusilla, with the monotonous intonation of a talking machine. That the orders were rational was evidence of the complete detachment that could enable her mind to function without conscious effort. It was as if she had wound up the machinery of her being and had withdrawn, leaving it to the old familiar routine.

After three weeks, her cloistered retreat was invaded by the most disturbing member of her family. The passionate devotion that had centered in her youngest-born—to her purblind vision the most perfect copy of herself—had undergone insidious change, as she centered her interest in Eileen. Theodora was irritating beyond endurance. With the child in the house, there could be no peace. Reluctantly, almost bitterly, she came back to the dull reality of life. David was still in Jacksonville from Monday to Saturday. After a day or two, she consented to let Theo stay with Dr. Schubert and Nanny. To her daughter-in-law she confessed that it was not because the old doctor was so lonely, but that she could not endure the child’s incessant chatter. The dropping of a fork behind her chair would send her into a paroxysm of shaking—Lavinia, who had always laughed at nervous women.

II

One morning Judith stood with her husband at an upper window, watching the agitated woman as she paced up and down before the house. The postman was late.

“She watched for him just that way yesterday, Lary. And when he failed to bring what she was expecting, her disappointment was pitiful.”

“My mother is going through some deep transition. I wish I could help her; but she has always shut me out. She is a hundred times more frank and confidential with you than she has ever been with me or with her own daughters. Do you think, dear, you could induce her to tell you what is troubling her?”

“I have tried. She talks freely about the emptiness and misery of her life. She is gnawingly unsatisfied; but she gives no clue. Such devotion as your father’s ought to have won her, years ago. I spoke rather plainly to her about it. I knew it would anger her; but I wanted to shock her into some line of rational thinking. The mention of her husband’s tenderness only infuriated her. She said such cruel things about him. And, Lary, he is as much in the dark as we are. He talked to me about it, Sunday night. Is it possible....”

“What, dear?”

“I wondered if there might be something in her life—long ago—a scar that is still sensitive—some shock that left a buried impression.”

“A lover, you mean? I hardly think so. She has always teased or brutally insulted my father with the mention of an old sweetheart of hers. It seems, they were deadly rivals, and papa won her because of his clean morals. The other man was the rakish sort—and in a town like Bromfield—with my mother’s prejudices and the thing that in her case passes for religious conviction....”

Just then the postman rounded the corner. There was only one letter for the Trench household, but its effect was electrical. Lavinia took it from his hand and ran stumbling into the house. At the sill she dropped to her knees, regained her footing and hurried inside. She had not opened the envelope, hence its contents could not account for her perturbed state of mind. It came to Judith ... that the whole future hung on the tenor of a reply.

III

At noon she appeared in the dining-room of Vine Cottage. Her cheeks were pasty, ashen, but her eyes burned with insane luster. She must send an important letter to Sylvia, and it was too late— She floundered, catching a chair for support. Would Larimore send the office boy out with a special delivery stamp?

“I’ll take your letter with me, and post it at the office,” Lary said, annoyed by the crafty manner that marked his mother’s too frequent subterfuges.

“I haven’t written it yet. It isn’t the kind I could dash off in a minute. Sylvia wants me to be in Detroit by Friday noon. I’ll have to get word—”

“Papa won’t be home until Saturday evening,” her son said sharply. “You can’t go off without consulting him.”

The word “consulting” was unfortunate. It released a flood of martyrdom. Lavinia thought she owed a duty to her daughter that must outweigh any consideration or demand on the part of her husband.

“Let me see my sister’s letter. If there is anything serious, I can telephone.”

“I didn’t bring it with me. In fact, I accidentally dropped it in the grate and it was burned before I could get it out.”

“A grate fire in July?”

“I was burning some scraps—and it got mixed with them.”

“You are not going away until papa comes home. It isn’t fair to him—and if you insist—I shall call Sylvia by long distance.”

Judith averted her eyes. The sight of her mother-in-law’s baffled fury was more than she could endure. In the end the woman agreed to defer her trip until Saturday night. She would write Sylvia that she could not be spared from home.

IV

Early Friday morning she came with another request. She had a letter from her husband which she handed to Lary, ostentatiously. David was entirely willing that she should go to Detroit. In fact, he had promised Sylvia that they together would visit her as soon as the housecleaning and redecorating of the apartment was over. He would have earned a vacation when the Jacksonville contract was finished.

“Now, Larimore, if you will look after the ticket—and the sleeper berth—I’ll only take a suit case, and your father can bring what I need in his trunk. By that time, I’ll know about the weather, and what kind of clothes I need. I want the ticket via Chicago. It’s so much shorter than the other route.”

“Chicago?” Something feline, insinuating, in her tone arrested him. “There’s no direct route from Springdale to Detroit via Chicago. You would have to go to Littlefield and wait there for the St. Louis train—and in Chicago it would mean going from one station to the other. The last time you tried that, you got lost, and missed your connection.”

“But I must—that is, I’d prefer to go that way. It wouldn’t matter if I did miss my train. Sylvia wants me to do some shopping for her.”

“Shopping on Sunday, mamma?”

As the woman hurried from her son’s presence, Judith heard her mutter: “There’s more than one way to kill a cat.”

V

Saturday was consumed with the endless little things that went to the preparation for a journey. At noon Lavinia sent Dutton out to post a letter to Sylvia. It was plastered over the upper third with a combination of pink and green stamps. Lavinia Trench abhorred that sort of thing; but she would not ask Larimore for a proper stamp to insure Sunday delivery of her letter. She shunned him with an animosity that was not to be misinterpreted. He had angered her profoundly. She told Judith that she would go to the station in Hafferty’s cab and wait there until David came in. In such a case he would not mind sitting with her until her train arrived. She had evidently asked too many favours of her son. She had always supposed that sons were glad to serve their mothers.Judith sought to analyse the woman’s torn state of mind. Did she always get into such a fever when she was going away from home? Lavinia had travelled much, in spite of her oft repeated assertion that she never went anywhere, never had any pleasure ... nothing but the dull drudgery of a wife and mother. Before her visit to Bromfield she had been in just such a mental state. But was it, exactly, this condition of mind? Two years ago, everything that Lavinia did—every subterfuge, every veiled speech or cruel innuendo—was carefully thought out. It all had a direct bearing on the main object. She must go to Bromfield, and she would not admit to her family—nor indeed to herself—that she had need to go. From infancy she had been devious, approaching her goal by the most tortuous path. She was this way in her housekeeping. One could not be a martyr if things were easy. The simple, natural way was hateful to her—the refuge of lazy wives.

This much Judith had set down, in her effort to understand her mother-in-law’s curiously warped psychology. But now there was a new phase. The episode of Sylvia’s letter, accidentally burned in the grate on a steaming July day, sufficed to betray a significant breaking-up of the tough fibre of an irrational but tremendously efficient mind. The mycelium of decay—some deadly fungus—had penetrated the heartwood of Lavinia Trench’s being. She went into a panic at the slightest turn in her plans. She no longer counted upon the unforeseen contingency, or guarded against it. That that crashing letter—the occasion for this hurried trip to Detroit—was not from Sylvia, Judith was morally certain. From whom, then? She laid the perplexity wearily aside. With one unknown quantity, she might have solved the equation. Here were two unknown and unknowable quantities, since Lavinia—after her two disastrous blunders—refused to talk except in monosyllables.

VI

When the suit case was in process of preparation, Judith invaded Mrs. Trench’s bedroom. She brought a dark negligÉe for the Pullman, in place of the delicate one that Sylvia had ridiculed, two years ago. As she offered it, her mother-in-law turned furtively to conceal something she was in the act of securing in the bottom of her small travelling bag. Her fingers caught at the edge of a night-dress, awkwardly, and the thing was revealed ... the borrowed volume of Browning.

---

A brief, unsatisfactory letter came Monday noon, while David was having luncheon at Vine Cottage. It was written on Pullman paper, in a loose scrawl. The train was four hours late, and of course there was no one at the station to meet her. But then, she had not expected to be met. Everything would be all right, she was sure. It was frightfully hot in Detroit. She would not write again until Tuesday evening, since she and Sylvia would be up to the ears in housecleaning.

“I can’t, somehow, feel that things are right,” David said, returning the envelope to his pocket and drawing out another. “Vine acted so strange while we were waiting in the station. I thought I ought to go along to take care of her—but this work in the office is so pressing—and I’m just compelled to go to Jacksonville for part of the week. I told her, if she needed me....” He halted, his eyes receding. “She flared out at me so fiercely that I didn’t say another word. That’s where I ought to have been firm. But I never could understand your mother, Lary.”

“None of us does, papa. What is the other letter?”

“It’s from Sylvia. I found it at the office.” Larimore read aloud:

“Dear Papa:

“I’m writing in a hurry, so that you can do me a favour. Mamma’s special has just arrived, saying she can’t reach Detroit until Tuesday noon—that you and Lary have upset all her plans. Well, now, please, please, PLEASE upset them some more. Not that I don’t want her to visit me; but it is terribly inconvenient now. The place is torn up with painters and paper-hangers. The weather is a fright—and Oliver cross as a bear. Mamma says she must be here to help me. But you know how I hate to have her around when I have anything important to do. If you can induce her to wait a week—really, I’m afraid Oliver won’t be civil to her, in his present mood—you’ll do her and us a big service.

“Your affectionate Daughter,
Sylvia.”

II

Four days of agonized suspense, during which—at Lary’s urgent request—David abstained from replying to either of the letters ... and Lavinia Trench came home. She walked into the house, a tottering old woman. Theo and her father were in the dining-room, trying to choke down Drusilla’s tempting dinner, and they started from the table as if an apparition from the dead had confronted them. She was dusty and disheveled. The close travelling hat hung limp over one eye, and through the greenish-gray of her cheeks the bones were modelled remorselessly.

“What—what has happened to you, Vine? Have you been in a wreck?”

“A wreck? Oh, yes, a wreck. Everything is a wreck.”

She sank into a chair and sat staring at the floor. After a moment she collected herself to ask: “Has Sylvia written?” And then: “What has Sylvia written?”

“Nothing—except the letter she sent before you got there. She wanted you to wait until she was through with her housecleaning—”

“I know all about that! David Trench, if you ever speak to that unprincipled girl, I’ll....” Lavinia glared, her heart pounding visibly. “She ... I might have known what to expect, after the letter she wrote when Syd and Eileen were married. She’s worse than Eileen, a hundred times worse. She’s capable—of lying—about her own mother. She’ll try to lie out of this thing. You can’t depend on a word she says. And Oliver’s as unprincipled as she is.”

In times of stress it had always been a source of relief to Lavinia to talk—to abuse some one. More often than not, David was the victim. Now she was hardly conscious of his presence. Theodora she did not see at all. She was sunk in the morass of her own misery, a misery so devastating that her worst enemy must have pitied her.

“Was Sylvia unkind to you?”

“Unkind? I like the way you pick your words!”

“I’m so sorry, Vine. You must make allowances for the hot weather—and Oliver’s uncertain temper. Sylvia had enough to upset her.”

“That’s no excuse for treating her mother in such a shameful way.”

She went up to her room and shut herself in. From behind a curtain she watched while David went to the cottage to consult his son. There was no train arriving from Detroit at that hour of the day. It later developed that Lavinia had left the train at Littlefield, and that her travel-stained appearance was the result of a rough ride in a service car. David had often come home that way, when he had contracts in Pana and Sullivan. He knew, too, that it was the Chicago train; but the fact was without significance for him.

When the woman had calmed herself somewhat, she told a more or less coherent story. She had foolishly tried to surprise Sylvia—had pictured her daughter’s delight, when she should walk in, unannounced, on the heels of the letter that deferred her coming until Tuesday. She went to the apartment in a cab and rang the bell. There was no one at home. She returned to the station and wrote the letter to David—she would not have told him for the world that she was greeted by locked doors.

“Why didn’t you go right to the janitor, my dear?” David asked, tenderly. “You know Oliver and Sylvia often go out on the lake, Sundays, when it’s hot. And—it just occurs to me—are you sure you went to the right place?”

Judith, watching the unfoldment of the story from a vantage point that was not David’s, thought the woman clutched eagerly at a plank she had hitherto not seen. She gained a precious interval of thought, while her lips retorted:

“I should think I ought to know Sylvia’s address.”

“Yes, but those great apartment houses all look alike. You might not even have been on the right street. You know, once when you went to St. Louis—”

“Yes, but that time I took the wrong car line. It was the fault of the policeman who directed me. I’d think a cabman would know the streets.”

“What did Sylvia say—when you finally—”

“What did she say? She didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t let me in. I tried to telephone her from the hotel, Monday morning—and I’m morally certain it was Oliver who answered the ’phone. When I said it was mother, he said I had the wrong number, and hung up. I tried again, and they wouldn’t answer.”

“But when you went back to the house—”

“I went three times—and once I know I saw Sylvia peeping through the curtain at the apartment door. She didn’t want me there, and she wouldn’t let me in.”“I’m going to call Sylvia up and ask her what she means by—”

Lavinia leaped across the room and fell upon her husband, forcing him roughly into his chair.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort. Haven’t I been humiliated enough already?”

III

They were interrupted by the clanging of bells, on Sherman avenue. Judith went to the window, to report that a cloud of smoke was visible against the western sky. A moment later, Dutton called from the lawn that the Marksley house was burning. Theodora wanted to see the fun. He would drive her out, if her father and brother were willing. They were not willing!

Dutton’s disappointment was greater than Theo’s, albeit she would have revelled in the sight of that one particular fire. Dutton could not make out why people kept a car, if they were too stingy to use it. Nothing ever happened in Springdale, and when there was a little excitement, a fellow wasn’t allowed to enjoy it.

But the spectacle would hardly have been worth the exertion of cranking the car. The Monday paper gave a graphic account of the blaze that started in the store room on the top floor, and was extinguished before it had accomplished more than partial destruction of the roof. The damage was amply covered by insurance. It was understood that Mr. David Trench would investigate the loss, and make necessary repairs, at the insistence of the insurance company.

---

Early Thursday morning, David was on the point of going out to the Marksley Addition to estimate the fire loss, when he stopped at sight of Judith, entering her own gate. He crossed the parched grass of the wide lawn and joined her. Once before he had hinted that his wife’s mind might be failing—that the shock of Eileen’s tragedy and the consequent relief of her propitious marriage might have unsettled her mother’s reason. He had talked to Dr. Schubert about it, but had elicited no sympathy for his theory. The physician did not believe for a moment that Sylvia—in spite of the evidential letter to her father—had refused to open the door or to answer the telephone. Sylvia was entirely absorbed in herself, but she was not a fool. He was rather taken with the belief that Lavinia had been playing some sort of prank on her family. A born play-actor, she grew weary of the burden of actuality, and sought relief—excitement—in a world of make-believe. This time she had miscalculated, and found things hard to explain.

“He said one thing that went against the grain, Judith, even from Dr. Schubert. He said that when we make a lifelong practice of petty deception, we don’t gain the facility we gain by any other constant exercise; but instead, we grow reckless, until we are unable to know truth from falsehood. Then we overreach ourselves. I accept the fact—but I don’t like to think that Vine would deliberately—lie to me. She doesn’t always see things in their true relations. But that she would make up a lie ... I can’t believe that.”

“Certainly you can’t, father.”

Through the sheer curtains of her bedroom window Lavinia watched them—Lavinia who through five days of shifting from one detail to another had maintained the mystery of her fruitless visit. What were they saying? She strained her keen ears, to catch only a muffled note of solicitude. Now the postman loomed in sight. The ubiquitous postman! If he had not delivered that letter.... In her rage, she began to abuse the postman for her wretchedness, the collapse of her iridescent bubble of happiness. He was putting into David’s hand some letters and a paper, the Bromfield Sentinel. She had forgotten that this was Thursday. She saw her husband open the crude little sheet and glance at the Personal Column, where he so often found news of a friend he had not seen since his wedding day. A long agony of waiting ... and David thrust the paper into Judith’s hand and walked rapidly away, a strange look on his transparent face.

II

What had he seen in the column of village gossip? Lavinia was conscious that a hornets’ nest had been rent asunder, above her head. A hundred furious possibilities buzzed in her ears. Stumbling in wild agitation to the deep closet of her room, she took a leather-bound volume from her Gladstone, where it had lain since her return from Detroit. Without opening it, she fled in a panic to Vine Cottage—burst into the breakfast-room, with a fine show of indignation, and flung the book on the table.

“There! I’m done with that thing. Browning’s a fool!”“I’m sorry you have found him unprofitable. He isn’t easy reading.”

“I have as much sense as you or Mrs. Henderson. You made me believe he told the truth. I hate a liar. I never told a lie in my life.”

“I didn’t ask you to take the volume,” Judith said pointedly.

“No, but you made me believe there was something in it—something that was an improvement on the Bible....”

Her daughter-in-law took up the offender and carried it to the library. When she returned, there was a precipitate relapse into a chair. Lavinia had improved the interval to look for the Sentinel. It was not in the room. A bitter tirade poured from her purple lips. There was no use in people trying to shirk responsibility. David had always done it. So had Larimore. They continually placed her in untenable situations and then left her to bear the consequences alone. She had had to rear the family single-handed, to take all the responsibility for their moral and financial welfare. If it had not been for her, they might have been criminals or tramps. David had never concerned himself for her ... or them.

“Mother, I can’t listen to such outrageous injustice. I have never seen a more considerate husband than father is to you. Even Lary, with all his tenderness, and his perfect comradeship, has his eyes on himself most of the time. Father never thinks of himself. His whole heart is given to you and his children.”

“Yes, and he hangs over me until he drives me to distraction. I’ll tell him where I have been—if he doesn’t stop following me about—as if I hadn’t a right to go where I please.”

III

Lavinia’s usual solvent, a flood of tears, failed her. Dry-eyed she left the room, forgetting to ask for the paper, which had been the real object of her call. Judith returned to the library and took down the volume of Browning. In some unfathomable way it was responsible for the distressing situation. As she turned the pages, pencil marks caught her eye. A line, a word or two, in some instances an entire stanza had been underscored. They were, without exception, love passages. Well over towards the back, a sheet of note paper came to view, covered with Lavinia’s tight, precise writing. If Browning would change the subject, just when you thought you had grasped his meaning ... at least, you could fling your net over the elusive concept and carry it away—isolate it from the confusing wealth of context.

But no! This was more than random copying. Widely separated passages had been woven together into a kind of confession of faith ... like lemon jelly in a mould. Judith, as she read, forgot that she was looking into another woman’s soul, forgot Lavinia, in the fascination of following the curious windings of Lavinia’s mind.

“Come back with me to the first of all. Let us lean and love it over again. Let us now forget and now recall, and gather what we let fall. Each life’s incomplete, you see. I follow where I am led, knowing so well the leader’s hand. Oh, woman, wooed, not wed! When we loved each other, lived and loved the same, till an evening came when a shaft from the devil’s bow pierced to our ingle-glow, and the friends were friend and foe. Never fear but there’s provision of the devils to quench knowledge, lest we walk the earth in rapture—making those who catch God’s secret just so much more prize their capture. The true end, sole and single, we stop here for is this love-way with some other soul to mingle. How is it under our control to love or not to love? Heart, shall we live or die? The rest ... settle by and by.”

Judith laid the sheet in its place and returned the volume to the bookcase. Yes, David was right. But what a weird obsession! Lavinia, out of the pregnant depths of her misery, had fashioned a lover to her liking, a phantom lover, to be communed with in secret. Had she gone to Detroit, not to visit Sylvia, but to seek some fantastic realization of her yearning for the perfect romance? Why had she come home, shattered and undone. A real man ... the man she met in the Pullman when she was returning from Bromfield—the man who had fallen in love with her?

She paused beside the table where, an hour ago, she had laid the Bromfield paper. She looked at it with vacant eyes, striving to clarify her turbid thoughts. Gradually, out of the emptiness, words came up to her, the words that David had read, at the head of the “personal” column.

“Our distinguished citizen, Mr. Calvin Stone, has just returned from a ten days’ business trip to Chicago.”

The room with its delicate furnishings faded, as when the lights are suddenly turned off. Judith stared, her heart leaping in unrhythmic cadence, her eyes following the monstrous panorama that unrolled before her. Long ago she had gone to a little cinema theatre with Lary and the girls, where black dots had danced on a white screen. Black dots were dancing now, on the white screen of her memory.

A dozen disjointed fragments of conversation; an old story her grandmother had told her, of a secret wedding in Rochester; Lavinia’s greedy interest in the story, in all that pertained to Calvin and Lettie Stone; her determination to revisit Bromfield the summer following Mrs. Stone’s death; the miracle of her regeneration when she returned home; the yellow pallor on her face when she put the question: “Do people ever really get over things?” The dots had woven themselves into a succession of preliminary shapes, and all at once the picture was complete. Lavinia’s secret lay bare before her daughter-in-law’s gaze.

IV

Outside on the street there was commotion. Judith was aroused from her torpor of pain by Lavinia Trench’s voice, strident and hysterical:

“Carry him into the west room. You can’t take him upstairs on that stretcher. What has happened to him? Why didn’t you telephone me? David, are you alive?”

David had fallen from the roof of the Marksley house. No one knew what had caused the accident. He was standing on a wide ledge, that ought to have been secure. One of the workmen saw him stagger, reel backward and come crashing down. It was fortunate that he did not strike the stone pavement. That would have been fatal. He was apparently only stunned by the fall.

Judith followed the curious crowd into the house and bent above the stricken man, while his wife ran panting up the stairs to prepare his bed. He opened his eyes and his lips fashioned inarticulate words.

“The paper,” she saw rather than heard, “the paper ... burn it. I saw—in a flash—that blinded me—and I fell....”

---

The consulting surgeon was still upstairs with Dr. Schubert and the nurse. In the sun-room, the Venetian blinds drawn to shut out the hot July rays, the family sat, awaiting the verdict. Sydney and Eileen had hurried home from the West in response to a conservative telegram from Lary. Sylvia and her husband were already there. The meeting of the sisters was reserved, befitting the occasion. Now Sylvia forgot her father—her growing resentment because of the general misunderstanding with regard to her mother’s alleged visit—as she gazed across the spacious room at the beautiful young woman whom she could with difficulty accept as Mrs. Sydney Schubert.

“I can’t understand it,” she whispered to Oliver. “You know what a raw, scraggy girl she was when we left here. I couldn’t make out what Hal Marksley saw in her. But for Syd—he had such an eye for beauty. He never went with a girl who was plain or homely. Mamma never wrote us how she had changed.”

“I told you a long time ago,” her husband retorted, “that the ugly duckling had a way of growing into the swan of the family.”

Sylvia flushed, annoyed, and lapsed into silence.

II

Outside the passer-by paused to look curiously at the house. David Trench hovered between life and death, and the town forgot the summer heat in its anxious sympathy. No one had known what a great man he was, what an irreparable loss his death would mean to the community. All over the town little groups of prominent men discussed the catastrophe with hushed breathing. The labourers who had done David’s bidding for years wiped furtive tears from their eyes when they were told that the case was all but hopeless.

Fifty—the meridian of life! A younger man would stand a better chance. Dr. Schubert feared a spinal lesion. Yet the shock to the nervous system might account for the torpor that had prevailed, with fleeting lucid intervals, for four days. If that were all, the human machine would right itself presently.

Early Sunday morning Mr. Marksley had come to the house to inquire about the patient, and to repudiate any responsibility for the accident ... and had encountered Lavinia Trench’s tongue in a manner that he was not likely to forget. She had another score to settle with this man and his family, unnamed but not absent from the motive power of her attack. The outburst had a salutary effect on the woman who, after the first excitement of David’s home-coming, had moved with the automatism of a sleep-walker. When he had gone, she sought Judith. Larimore must go at once and arrange with Dr. Schubert for consultation, the best surgeon in St. Louis.

III

When they were alone, she fell on her daughter-in-law’s neck, sobbing hysterically: “Oh, oh, oh, if he dies I shall go distracted. He doesn’t dare to die ... now. If he was going to die, why couldn’t it have been sooner? Oh, my God in heaven, what am I saying? Judith, can’t you save him? Don’t you know what it would mean for him to die now?”

“Try to be calm, mother. The case isn’t quite desperate.”

“Oh, but my case is desperate. You don’t know.... If you could have heard him, last night! He said the most terrible thing. He must have been thinking it, or it wouldn’t have slipped out like that, when his mind was wandering. When you think a thing over and over, you say it without meaning to. He took my hands and said he was only a carpenter’s son ... but Ch—rist was a carpenter’s son, too ... and it was worth carrying a cross all these years, to have me, when I belonged to another man.”

“Mother! Oh, this is pitiful.”

“I wanted to get down on my knees and tell him that I never belonged to any other man. I wanted to confess that I was the vilest sinner, and unworthy of his love. It wasn’t me, at all. I was standing to one side, looking at David and me, and thinking what I would do it I was in Vine Larimore’s place. And when I walked away, there didn’t seem to be any floor under my feet.”

“Mother, dear, why didn’t you open your heart to him, when you were so close?”

“No, no!” she cried, beating back the suggestion with baffled hands. “You never had David look at you with condemnation. Oh, I would rather have him slap my face. I could resent that. But to have him condemn—and then forgive....” She swayed weakly, all her force concentrated in the relentless mouth. “Judith, if he dies, it will be on my head. You told me that it was as bad to sin in thought as to carry out the desire. I wanted to kill David. Don’t look at me like that. I have to tell you. There is no one else I can trust—and I’ll babble it, when I don’t know I’m talking, if I don’t get it out of my mind.”

“How do you mean, mother?”

“Twice I tried. Once when you were in Europe—when his health was so poor—and I was going to give him the wrong medicine. And six weeks ago, when he brought a lot of money home—and I thought it would look as if a burglar did it. It was just after you took Theo to New York, and we were alone in the house. At the last moment, my courage failed. But if he dies, I will be held accountable for his murder. Judith, he has to live. Don’t you see....”

IV

And thus it came about that the great specialist had been sent for. Already he had been up there in David’s room for more than an hour. Now a door was opening, two pairs of feet were descending the stairs. Before those in the sun-room realized it, the distinguished man had passed to the waiting cab and was gone. Lavinia was on her feet, aquiver with excitement.

“Where is he going? I want to ask him a hundred questions.”

“He has told me everything you need to know,” the old family physician told her sternly. “He will send us another nurse from St. Louis—a young man capable of handling a dead weight. My diagnosis, unfortunately, was correct.”

“Will he get well?” Lavinia’s lips were blue and her eyes protruded.

“We must wait and see. He will be paralysed from the waist down.”

David to sit in a wheel-chair the rest of his life! Vine staggered from the room. Her daughter-in-law followed, fearful for one or the other of those two actors in life’s sorry drama. But the stricken woman only paused an instant at her husband’s door, and passed on to the performance of some commonplace duty. Judith returned to the lower hall, to hear Dr. Schubert say:

“He begged me not to let them prolong his life. Said it was wrong to hang on, when he had finished his task. He would have a fighting chance, if he had the least recuperative desire. David doesn’t want to get well. He said that death was nothing to be afraid of—after a man had lived.”

“He sees an honourable way out of the hell he has had for thirty years,” Syd muttered, his blue eyes wrathful, his slender hands clenched. “I hope there is a heaven—that he’s so sure of. We know what it would be for him here, chained down to a pair of helpless legs. All his life he has walked away from it, when he had taken all he could endure. It would break Eileen’s heart to see her father—”

Out in the kitchen Drusilla burst all at once into song:

The nurse hurried down to check the stridulous singing, and to say that Mr. Trench wanted to see his two daughters, Judith and Eileen, together. The specialist had said it would do him no harm to talk quietly with his family.

V

At the threshold Eileen asked, her face white with grief: “Judith, did I do this? Am I to blame for his fall? Last night he told Theo that when he was up on that ledge, he saw something. And the pity and horror of it made him lose his footing. The poor baby thought he meant the burning of that ugly gable.”

“I know what he had in mind, dear. You can go to him without a pang of regret.”

A moment later the girl was kneeling at her father’s side. There was no blemish on the beautiful face, no wasting, as of disease, and the blue eyes smiled tenderly, their smile changing to protest, as she cried:

“Oh, papa, this is the hardest part of my punishment—to know that I made you suffer. If only I had known!”

“You brought me the only real happiness of my life. It was worth all I paid. When I saw you—the day you came home from Europe—I almost died of joy. And when I heard you give your vow to Sydney, I said: ‘My cup runneth over.’ I know now why Sylvia had to treat him so cruelly. I asked God to make her realize his worth. What foolish children we are, when we pray. I knew the sorrow of his boyhood, and how pure his heart was. Eileen, none of us knew that he had to minister to a gentle, afflicted mother, all those years ... just to fit him to be your husband.”

“Papa!” The girl’s tears wet her father’s face. “And only you could have seen it. There isn’t another man in the world who could have taken me—without ever humiliating me—and made me want to be the best woman that ever lived.”

“And you won’t ever forget that men need love?”

“They need it more than we do. Perhaps I can make up some of what I owe you—when I take care of Syd’s father ... make his home bright and happy.”

David stroked her hand, his eyes wandering to the face of Judith who stood, shaken with emotion, at the foot of the bed.“Come to me, dear daughter. I have something to tell you, while I have my wits about me. It may be our last chance.”

The woman pressed her hand to her quivering chin, as the sobs surged up in her throat. Then she hid her face in the pillow, her cheek close to the dear face, so that David could whisper in her ear:

“You took care of the paper? You won’t let her know I saw it? After I am gone, she can go to him and be happy. I forgive them, as Christ has forgiven me.”

“Father! Now I can believe there was a Christ.”

“It wasn’t her fault, Judith. You were never harsh with Eileen. You must not be harsh with her. She was too brilliant for me. I was never anything but a drag. I was too stupid to understand, when she told me I had won her away from him. If I had had any wit—but I did love her so!”

It was not a wail of regret. Just a simple statement of fact. He had bought a priceless treasure and had paid for it with the sorrow of the loveless years. He looked up, to see Eileen gazing in troubled wonder.

“I didn’t mean to say so much; but I believe it would be all right for you to tell her—about her mother. If it was right for Eileen—it couldn’t have been wrong for her mother. We can’t see the flowers when we put the ugly bulbs into the ground. Perhaps her own child can help you show her the path.”

“Father, I can’t endure it,” Judith cried. “It was I who blundered. I tried to show her the way. I didn’t know what her ailment was. I opened the wrong medicine.”

“You gave her your best. That’s all any of us can do. You and Eileen and I have suffered; but for my poor Vine it is terrible. She had so much love to give, and it was all sealed up in her heart until it—putrified—poisoned her. Tell her that she was not to blame. Tell her that ... Christ died ... to make others ... happy....”

The words trailed off in a half audible whisper, and David Trench slept.

---

It was the largest funeral Springdale had ever seen. Lavinia reflected, with grim pride, that not even President Henderson had called forth so many or such magnificent floral tributes. Dr. Clarkson conducted the simple service and the Conservatory Quartette sang the old sweet songs that David loved. With uncovered heads his townsmen stood by while his tired body sank to rest. Then life went on as before.

II

Lavinia and Theodora were alone in the big house with Drusilla. Lary thought it absurd for them to occupy so much room. He would be going to New York in the early fall, now that Springdale had nothing to hold him. His mother might as well return to Vine Cottage. She had built the great Colonial house in order to make a propitious marriage for Sylvia. A similar need would never confront her.

“Move into this little place? Indeed I shall do nothing of the sort. In fact, I have made up my mind to go back to Bromfield.”

“Bromfield?” The tone carried something dangerously like a sneer.

“The town was good enough for your grandparents,” his mother retorted hotly. “I won’t have a relative left here but Eileen, and she will certainly never be any comfort to me. It’s a shame, the way she could forget her father in less than a month. She acts as if Dr. Schubert were her own father. I don’t believe she has shed a tear. No, I wouldn’t stop a day in Springdale for that ungrateful girl.”

“But your friends of a lifetime are here.”

“You can make new friends in New York. Why shouldn’t I? You think of me as an old woman, Larimore. I don’t like it. The day has gone by when a woman of fifty has to sit in the chimney-corner. I have written to Ted, telling him that I want to buy back the old home. You shall remodel it for me. That would be a work you could take pride in—the house your great-grandfather built.”

III

When Lavinia and Judith were alone, the real purpose of the former’s early morning call revealed itself:

“I want you to tell me how far you can hold a person to a promise—a voluntary promise, written on paper and signed.”

“It depends—” Judith eyed her narrowly—“on the nature of the one who makes the promise. I wouldn’t give a fig for all the contracts that ink and paper could record, if there were no volition—”

“Yes, but I am sure—that is, I think I have a right to demand....” She swallowed hard and a hunted look invaded the black eyes. “Would it be all right for me to—to ask for some satisfaction, some decision? You can’t let things go on in uncertainty. You have to come to an understanding. I—that is, I don’t think my brother has treated me right. Would you send the letter?”

“Use your own judgment, mother. You know what a wretched failure I made of my former attempts to advise you.”

“No, Judith, that was what I wanted to say to you. I have thought it all out, and have come to the conclusion that—that I had to do everything just as it came about. Oh, I don’t know how to tell you—but I begin to see how good comes out of evil—how I had to suffer to gain my happiness.”

At the door she turned, to ask, as if she were consulting a sorceress: “Would you advise me to write the letter—a very plain one?”

“Suspense is deadly. I should relieve my mind, at any cost,” her daughter-in-law said dryly. It was Lavinia Trench’s self-justification, the mind that could mould the universe into a pedestal for the support of her righteousness. It would be this way to the end. Nothing would ever change her. David was dead, and a letter of condolence had come from Calvin Stone, a letter that all the world might read. In all likelihood there had been no other word from him, since Lavinia was free ... to make uncomfortable demands.

She went home and wrote. With her own hands she carried the letter to the office, to insure delivery. It had occurred to her to register it ... her feet tugging to free themselves from the quicksand of doubt that spread all around her. But Drusilla or Larimore might take the receipt from the postman’s hand. Besides, it would be a confession of the fear that was in her. She must not act as if there were any question of her right, in this matter. To Lavinia it was still “this matter.” She did not name it, even to herself.

IV

Six tortured days she waited, and then the response came. Theodora ran in terror to Judith, her black eyes wide, her cheeks ashen.

“What is it, precious? Don’t stand there shaking like that.”

“It’s my mamma, and she’s—I think she’s gone crazy.”

“Because of something—a letter that came a few minutes ago?” She had the child in her arms, soothing her with gentle caresses.

“Oh, Sister Judith, what could my uncle write that would make anyone as furious as that? Last night she couldn’t sleep—because she said our whole life depended on the letter she was looking for. She made me come and get in bed with her, and she told me about Bromfield till I fell asleep in her arms.”

“And your uncle refused to let her have the old home?”

“I don’t know. I was up on the third floor with Drusilla, and all at once I knew that I was needed down stairs. When I was half way down the hall—there stood my mamma like a statue. She didn’t see me, any more than if I’d been a spook without any body. And all at once she began running back and forth and tearing the letter to bits. And then she threw them on the floor and stamped on them. She didn’t speak one single word. That was the awful part—to be as mad as that, and take it out in just jumping up and down!”

“Stay here, dearie. Or, no—” after a moment’s thought—“I want you to go and spend the day with Eileen. Don’t tell her about the letter. Dutton can drive you over in the car. You won’t need a hat.”

V

Judith surmised that Lavinia would not miss the child. For an hour there was no sign of life in the big house. Then the widow emerged clad in all her weeds. From the florist’s shop, at the corner, she returned with a great cornucopia. It was evident that her destination was the cemetery, and that she intended to walk. For Lavinia Trench, on a steamy August day, such a walk was nothing short of a penance.

Noon went by ... one, two o’clock ... and she came staggering up the steps, and into the cool living-room of Judith Trench’s home. Without a word she sank into the nearest chair and drew aside the crÊpe veil, revealing a countenance from which every vestige of youth had been erased. With the toe of her small shoe she began to trace the winding pattern of the Oriental rug, her lips set hard together.

“Take off your hat, mother. You don’t want that hot veil around your neck.”

“Yes, I’ll take it off. I don’t intend ever to wear the thing again. If it isn’t in your heart—crÊpe veils and flowers on graves won’t put it there. Oh, my God in heaven, why did David have to die—at such a time? What right had he to die—and expose me to such an insult?”

She had hurled the mourning hat from her, and sat staring at her moist shaking hands. Then came the reaction, a flood of colour, not scarlet but dull raspberry, that spread over neck, cheek and brow. Stiffening in her chair, she cried:

“It was you who did it, Judith Ascott, every bit of it.”

“I did what?” Judith’s eyes blazed with sudden anger. No, she would no longer palliate ... spare this woman, who had always contrived to shift responsibility to shoulders less blameworthy than her own, who had taken the best she could snatch from life, giving not even decent gratitude in return.“You said that Sydney married Eileen and made her happy, because she didn’t resist the temptation to do wrong.”

“Oh, how monstrous!”

“Well, I hope you aren’t going to deny that you told me, point-blank, that nothing but a broken axle prevented you from being untrue to your husband. Was it my fault that the axle didn’t break for me?” She talked wildly, her thin neck drawn and throbbing.

“I blundered horribly when I said those things to you. I thought you were a woman who could handle an abstract idea. I didn’t know that everything I said must necessarily have a personal application. If I had understood why you were unhappy ... if you had told me the truth, instead of leaving me to guess it, after the mischief was done—”

“I ought to have told you—told such a thing to a stranger ... when I never more than half admitted it to myself?”

“No, I am sure you couldn’t have told me. It is just the awful fatality, that I should have put weapons into your hand that would wound you—the very knives that removed the false growth from Eileen’s spirit.”

“Yes, and if the cancer is deep inside—if it grows out of your heart ... the more you cut it away, the stronger it grows. God knows, I tried to tear it out by the roots. I tried three times to hate—”

VI

Judith drew near and laid a hand on the frantic woman’s arm.

“Mother, it is the saddest case I have ever known. If I assure you of my pity and my earnest wish to help you ... for Lary’s sake, and Theo’s,” Judith raised a hand that checked the bitter outburst, “will you talk to me with absolute frankness? You can’t bear this hideous thing alone. You can’t take it to your daughter.”

“Sylvia! I would as soon put my hand in the fire, and expect not to be burned. She would throw me out of her house, as an abandoned woman. She is hard and selfish and cruel. I don’t know where she gets such a nature.”

“We won’t talk of Sylvia now.”

“No, I hope I’ll never see her again. And ... Judith ... I am going to tell you ... from the beginning. You know already—the worst of it. David knew, the night before he died. That’s why I had to run away, when I tried to lay the roses on his grave. It made me wild with rage ... to know he was pitying me.”

She rocked to and fro a moment, as if to settle the sequence of her story. Then her eyes blazed with a challenging light.

“You are a cold woman. You can sit there and weigh me ... like a pound of steak. You never knew what it was to want something with your whole mind and body and soul. You are not capable of a passion that would burn you to a cinder. There are not many women with as deep a nature as mine. It began when I was fourteen—a plain little thing like Theo is, now. The night of Edith Trench’s Hallowe’en party—and David begged his sister to invite me. All the others were grown, nearly. I happened to be standing in a dark corner, under some mistletoe, and Calvin Stone tiptoed up behind me and grabbed me in his arms and kissed me.

“That night I couldn’t sleep ... nor the next one. Everything was changed. For two years, I used to almost die when I saw him out with the older girls. Then he went away to Buffalo, to business college, and I began to grow pretty. It’s a way we have in my father’s family. When he came home, he fairly swept me off my feet. If David had ever made love to me the way Calvin did— The room would swim before my eyes when he kissed me. He wanted me to marry him right away. But in Bromfield that would have made a scandal. A girl didn’t dare to seem too anxious.

“After about a year he began to cool off. I waited two years more, and then I married David. I may as well tell you why. Calvin went to Rochester and married that Fournier girl. She made him marry her. Thank goodness, I was safe in Olive Hill before they let it out that they were married. But the truth has leaked out at last. It always does, no matter how smart you think you are in concealing it.”

She stopped. This was not what she wanted to say—or believe. A deep nausea overcame her. Eileen’s secret ... her own! But no, she was making confession. It would not go any further, if she told Judith all ... to the last wicked detail.

“Ellen thought all along that I married David for spite; but she doesn’t know that I never got over loving Calvin Stone. When I was first married I used to lie awake nights, thinking of the time when David and Lettie would both be dead, and I could have the man I wanted. I forced David to make good, so that I could taunt Calvin. After he moved back to Bromfield—when his father broke down, and he had to take charge of the bank—Ellen and Lettie were friends. That way, I learned a good deal about them. I saved all her letters that mentioned Calvin. The others I put in the fire, as soon as David had read them. The bundle I want buried with me. It was reading them over and over that made me the woman I am now.”“Mother, can’t you go home and burn them—blot this hateful thing from your mind—now when your heart is soft because of father?”

“David Trench! He doesn’t count, one way or the other. David was never anything but a makeshift in my life. If he had abused me, instead of giving me all that affection, it wouldn’t have been so bad. I didn’t want his love, and I despised him because he could go on loving me ... the way I treated him. I hated my children, because he was their father. After they came, I loved them for what I could see of myself in them. Isabel was so like her father that it was comical—and I could hardly bear to touch her. Judith, think of being a wife for almost thirty years to a man you hated! You couldn’t have gone through it.”

“No, I would have run away.”

“But I hadn’t any place to run to. I was caught, like a hungry rat in a trap. I could look out through the bars and see all the things I wanted, beyond my reach. When I did drag something inside, it turned out to be different from what I expected. When we celebrated our silver wedding, the minister told how we were the ideal couple, that God had joined together in our cradles. It was the vilest mockery. But David was so proud.”

“And you never saw his worth—never responded to his tenderness?”

“Not until I came home from Bromfield, two years ago. That was the only time David and I came together, in all those years. I never knew how handsome he was until I had been looking at Calvin every day for a month. And his appearance wasn’t all of it. I had made up my mind, while I was still at Ellen’s, that I was going to treat David different. You couldn’t help seeing that I had all the best of the bargain. The house Calvin built, ten years ago, is no comparison to mine. And he had to mortgage it to the limit, when his son got into trouble. Lately he sold it, to keep from losing it outright. That was when I wrote him that I would buy back the old house from my brother. But that’s ... I’ll come to that, later on. All those years I had been thinking of David as a poor carpenter, and Calvin as a banker, in fine society. And when I found out that he didn’t have near as much as I had—”

“I see how you found your deep satisfaction.”

“No, you don’t. It wasn’t just the money, and David’s position in Springdale—on the Board of Trustees, and all that. I got my real triumph after I started for home. I had snubbed Calvin and tormented him in every way I could. I wasn’t going to let him think I went to Bromfield on his account. Besides, I wanted to hurt him, for the way he had treated me. I thought I would take it out on him, and that would end it. If I had been trying to win him, I couldn’t have used better tactics.

“I was on the train and we were pulling out of Rochester when he came walking in the Pullman. At first he pretended to be surprised. Said he was going to Buffalo on business. After a while he owned up that he had come ... because he wanted to be alone with me. He told me that his life had been hell on earth, and he was glad when Lettie died. He even said that if David should die, he would go to the end of the world to compel me to marry him.”

“The boor!”

Lavinia ignored the comment. Hot lava was pouring from the crater of her wretchedness, lava long pent up, and such flimsy obstacles as her daughter-in-law’s disgust were swept away unnoticed in its stream.“I told him he wasn’t fit for David Trench to wipe his feet on. I didn’t mean it ... but I talk that way when I am beside myself. When I repulsed David, he would look hurt and walk away. But it only made Calvin more determined. He said he would lie down and let me wipe my feet on him. And then he said something sneering about ‘Dave Trench.’ I flew into a rage—and he said I always was a beauty when I was angry. Afterwards he almost cried when he begged me to show some little spark of affection for him. He was always that way ... wanted what he thought he couldn’t get. I see the whole thing now, as plain as day. It is easy to see things, when it’s too late. If the minister hadn’t preached that sermon about helping to redeem sinners by making them suffer, and you hadn’t told me all that other ... about it being worse to want to sin than to come right out and do the thing you wanted....”

Judith shifted uneasily in her chair. Her own indictment was surely on the way. She had no choice but to see the play through, to the final curtain.

“He began writing to me, on one pretext or another. I didn’t answer more than half of his letters. And the meaner I treated him, the more devoted he grew. All that time I was falling in love with David—and I didn’t hesitate to tell Calvin so. It seemed to make him wild. The very day I found out about Eileen, I had had a letter from him that I was ashamed to read, in my own room. I believe that letter would have finished him for me ... if it hadn’t been for Eileen.

“When he heard about Larimore’s marriage, he wrote again—and asked me to forgive him for writing the other letter. But he said his love for me drove him to it. And at the same time, David was acting like a paralytic old woman—just crushed by what Eileen had done. I couldn’t help seeing the difference. I knew what Calvin would have done, if he had had a daughter act that way. He would have put his son in jail, if it hadn’t been for Lettie.”

“You needed a masterful man. David was too gentle....”

“He never was any match for me ... in any way. If I hadn’t snapped him up, the night after Mr. Stone told me that Calvin was married....” She shook herself, as if to free her body from some insidious lethargy that was creeping over her.

“While you and Larimore were in Europe, it got to be like a continued story in a magazine. I kept wondering what would happen next. I had cut loose from David, and I couldn’t keep my mind off of Calvin. After you came home with Eileen, and I had the long talk with you, the story took a different turn. Still ... I don’t believe anything would have come of it if Calvin hadn’t had to take a business trip to Chicago. He wrote, in a kind of joking way, that if I would run up there and spend a few days with him, David would divorce me and we could be married at once. That was last April. I wrote back that I wouldn’t think of such a thing—and that men didn’t marry the women who forgot their morals—except at the point of a gun. He answered, with a kind of marriage compact—no matter what might come up—he would marry me as soon as I was free. He had to go to Chicago again in July. I told him I would see him in Sylvia’s home, on his way out, and we could talk things over, and come to an understanding. It was all Larimore’s fault that the whole thing turned out wrong.”

“How Lary’s fault?”

“You know he wouldn’t let me start in time to catch Calvin in Detroit. Then I planned to go by way of Chicago, and see him between trains. But Larimore insisted on getting the ticket direct. There was only one thing for me to do. I wired Calvin, and sent a special letter to Sylvia, saying I wouldn’t be in Detroit until Tuesday noon. I planned to get into Chicago early Monday morning, and go back to Detroit that night. I wrote the letter to David while I was waiting at the station, Sunday afternoon. The rest of it—after Calvin met me—is like a dream, a miserable dream. So much has happened since then.

“That evening he made me miss my train. After I had been with him a while, I was limp as a rag in his hands. He always had that way with women. I didn’t want to go. All the years of my misery had dissolved. I was like a starved person at a banquet ... seventeen again, and Calvin acting like a boy out of school. But the second day he began to change. He told me to quit acting like an old fool—said it wasn’t becoming in people of our age. If David had ever said anything like that to me—” Her hands worked convulsively and the teeth gave forth a sharp, gritting sound. “I tried to be the way Calvin wanted me, and everything I did was wrong. Once I flared up, and he told me to cut that out—that it was because of my vile temper that he didn’t marry me thirty years ago.”

“And you are going to discipline yourself, mother, so that after your year of mourning you can marry him and be happy?”

“Marry him!” A shrill laugh burst from Lavinia’s lips. “Marry him! He was married last Saturday to a rich widow in Rochester. That isn’t the worst of it. I had written him the plainest kind of letter—about the house we would remodel—and the contract he had sent me in April. They read it together. They are laughing at me now. God, I can’t stand it! To have them gloat over me! I could tear my heart out and stamp on it. I could curse. I could spit in the face of the God that made me. Why did you advise me to write the letter? It was you—you—”

She had leaped from her chair, her face livid, her arms writhing. Judith tried to speak. Her tongue was paralysed. She had looked into the soul of the woman who bore Larimore Trench, and the sight turned her sick with horror. Then a piercing scream, a startled cry, another scream, and Lavinia crumpled down in her chair, clasping her hands to her right side, shrieking and moaning by turns.

“Mother, what has happened to you? Let me send for a doctor.”

“No, no, don’t leave me!” A long wail of anguish indescribable—and she put forth a restraining hand. “Don’t you know what has happened to me? Can’t you see that I am dying? Dr. Schubert told me two years ago that there was danger. I didn’t believe him....”

She choked back another cry of pain, cringing until her right cheek almost touched her knee. Then she straightened herself and went on, through set teeth:

“You will take Theo, Judith, and keep her for your own? I wouldn’t want Sylvia to have her. You won’t let her—miss the path?”

“I will give her the best I have, mother. I know what you mean.” She stopped speaking, fascinated by the tinge of green that crept slowly up the stricken woman’s cheeks. The same dull green was advancing along the arms, where the black sleeves were drawn up. Lavinia saw it, too. She knew the portent. Once before, she had seen that wave of green that moved with deadly precision beneath the skin.“It’s the gall. It has burst. My grandmother died that way. She flew into a rage—after the doctor warned her not to. I taste it, now ... bitter ... in my throat....” She coughed spasmodically, and closed her eyes.

VII

Judith ran to the telephone. She told Lary that his mother had fainted. To Eileen she said bluntly: “Mother is dying. Send one of the doctors.”

Eileen called a dozen numbers before she located either Sydney or his father. Then she left her little sister in Nanny’s care and hurried to Vine Cottage.

When the old family physician reached the house, Lavinia Trench had passed beyond human aid. He drew Judith into the breakfast room and asked, unsteadily:

“Was there a violent outburst? Grief wouldn’t account for it ... nor remorse.”

The woman nodded, her throat swelling.

“Don’t tell Lary. He need not know. He wouldn’t understand. Women are so different, Dr. Schubert. I wouldn’t want Lary to despise his mother. She wasn’t wholly to blame—that the frost came too late.”

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