The fact that, while the countryside had been astir for weeks with rumors of Jacques Benoix' impending release, her daughters were quite unaware of them was evidence of the Madam's complete sovereignty over her realm. It would have been a brave man or woman who dared to gossip of Mrs. Kildare's affairs with her children. They remained unconscious of the undercurrent of excitement and speculation in the atmosphere about them. In time, mention of the pardon and reference to the old-time scandal it revived, was made in the newspapers; but these papers failed to reach the reading-table at Storm, and the girls did not miss them. Kate had never encouraged the reading of newspapers in her household, finding the monthly reviews cleaner and more reliable; and indeed the doings of people in the far-off world were less real to Jemima and Jacqueline than episodes in such novels as their mother read aloud by the evening lamp, while one girl sewed and the other lost herself in those dreams of youth which are such "long, long dreams."

They wondered a little, it is true, over Kate's frequent absences from home, and over the defection of Philip.

"He hasn't been here for days, and he used to come every evening," complained Jacqueline, always his sworn ally and companion. "No time for riding, or music, or even lessons—not that I'm complaining of that! But he's never been too busy for us before."

The fact was that Philip dared not trust himself at Storm just yet, not until he had accustomed himself to the immediate thought of Kate Kildare as his mother.

"Philip looks a little queer, too—sort of hollow about the eyes," mused Jemima, the observant. "Still, he always was rather a solemn person."

"No such thing, Jemmy!" cried Jacqueline, who could bear no criticism of the thing or person she loved. "He's positively giddy sometimes when I have him alone. Anyway, wouldn't you be solemn yourself, if you had a father in the penitentiary?"

"He ought to be used to it by this time. No, I don't believe it is that. I believe it is mother."

"What do you mean—'mother'?"

"Oh, nothing. Only"—Jemima severely bit off a thread—"I do wish mother'd grow wrinkled or—or fat, or something, like other people's mothers."

"Why, Jemmy Kildare!" cried the other, shocked. "How can you say such a thing? Mother's the most beautiful person in the world!"

"Exactly. If I'm not mistaken, Philip thinks so too."

"Well, why shouldn't he? That's nothing to be solemn about."

The other smiled an enigmatical smile.

"Stop looking like that horrid Mona Lisa. You mean—" Jacqueline stared, then shouted with laughter. "Blossom, you're too silly! Of course mother's the most beautiful person in the world, but after all she is—mother! She's old."

"Remember Henry Esmond."

"Pooh! That's in a novel. Why, Philip might as well get up a romantic passion for—for the Sistine Madonna."

"Which would be exactly like him," commented Jemima; but Jacqueline dismissed the absurdity from her mind with another laugh.

From day to day now, Kate put off the breaking of her news. "Not yet," she pleaded with her better judgment. "I will wait till everything is settled."

She waited a day too long.

Jemima had driven down to the crossroads store for some pressing necessity of the sewing-room. Like many country stores, it combined the sale of groceries, fishing-tackle, hardware, dry-goods, and other commodities with the sale of wet-goods, the latter being confined to the rear portion of the establishment, opening upon a different road from the front portion.

The proprietor's wife, who usually managed the dry-goods and groceries' section, happened to be absent at the time, and the proprietor's unaccustomed efforts to find the buttons Jemima needed aroused her quick impatience.

"Never mind—let me find them myself, Mr. Tibbits," she urged. "I'll put them down in your book. There's a customer in the back store. Do go and attend to him."

Tibbits meekly obeyed, murmuring, "You might find them buttons on the shelf with the canned goods, or then agin they might be under the counter behind them bolts of mosquito-bar."

So it happened that Jemima was on her knees behind the counter, quite invisible, when two women in sunbonnets entered, deep in a congenial discussion of their betters, such as might have been heard in a dozen homes in the vicinity that day. They had failed to recognize the buggy at the door as a Storm equipage.

"What I want to know is how's she ever goin' to manage with the two of them at once. They do say the young parson's sort of took his father's place with her."

"Laws! I should think she'd be ashamed. Her old enough to be his mother!"

"No, she ain't, either. She wa'n't twenty, nothin' like, when Mr. Kildare brought her here, and the French doctor's boy must a-been about ten then. Ten years or less ain't such a heap of difference, not when you hold your looks the way she does. Anyway, they been seen kissin'."

"You don't say!"

The informer nodded, pursing her lips. "It come to me pretty straight. That old nigger Zeke, who does chores about, seen 'em with his own eyes, and tol' me about it next day when he was doin' some work in my patch. Said he caught 'em kissin' and just carryin' on, right in the public road."

"The idea! What for do you s'pose they want the father pardoned out, then? She got up the petition herself. Laws, what a mix-up! I shouldn't think she'd dare have anything to do with either of them. Don't look good, does it? Him killin' her husband and all."

It was here that the girl behind the counter, flushed and furious and just about to speak, suddenly lost her color.

"There was some that never believed he done it, Miz Sykes. If you'd ever known the French doctor—always so sort of soft and gentle in his ways, didn't believe in huntin' rabbits unless for food, used to doctor animals just as if they was folks. He didn't seem the sort of man to make a killer. But there! You never can tell with for'ners. And Kildare wa'n't the sort of man to let his wife go gallivantin' round the country with a lover, that's certain. We was s'prised he stood it long as he did. Oh, I ain't sayin' Dr. Benoix done his killin' in cold blood! He prob'ly done it in self-defense. The gentlest critter'll fight if it's got to. But killin' it certainly was. No axdent about that!"

They went toward the back store, still talking, unaware of the white-lipped girl who slipped out from behind the counter and gained the refuge of her buggy with trembling knees.

Her knees might tremble, but her lips did not. They were set in a straight, grim line, and her brows met over eyes that had grown almost black. It would have been difficult to recognize in this stricken face the pink-and-white Dresden prettiness that had won her the sobriquet of "Apple Blossom."

An old man, fumbling at his cap as she passed, suddenly paused and stared after the buggy, aghast. He thought for the moment that he had seen the ghost of Basil Kildare.

She went straight to her mother's office, a small room opening off the great hall. She opened the door without knocking, and closed it after her.

"One moment, please, I am busy," murmured Kate, glancing up from her desk in surprise. She was not often interrupted so unceremoniously. But instantly she rose to her feet. She had no need to ask what had happened. The girl's face told her.

"Mother!" Jemima's voice was hoarse. "Is it true that—Philip's father—is coming out of the penitentiary?"

Kate inclined her head, paling.

"And that you are getting him out?"

"Philip and I together."

"Why?"

Kate did not answer. She was struggling to collect her wits for this sudden necessity.

Jemima came quite close, searching her face with curious grimness; and Kate saw the resemblance the old man had seen, and shivered.

"Mother, that was not the only news I heard at the store. I overheard some women talking. They said—"

"Surely we need not concern ourselves with village gossip, my child!" Kate was fighting for time.

But the appeal to the girl's pride went for once unheeded. "If they lied," she said tensely, "they must be punished for it. If they did not—Mother, what they said was that my father was not killed by accident. They said the man who killed him was Dr. Benoix. They said—why."

Kate moistened her lips. The time had come to speak, to explain what she could, to lie if necessary—anything to wipe out of her child's face that look of frozen horror.

But her tongue refused her bidding. She was hypnotized by the realization of her own utter folly. To have left such a discovery to chance! To have hoped that some impossible luck would keep her daughters in ignorance of her tragedy—and this in a rural community where nothing is ever forgotten, where every sordid detail of its one great scandal had been for years a household word!

The two stared at each other. Slowly the ruthless inquiry in the girl's eyes changed into fear, into a very piteous dismay. "Can't you deny—anything?" she whispered at last. "Mother! say it isn't so. I'll believe you."

She began to cry; not weakly with hidden face, but as a man cries, painful tears rolling unheeded down her cheeks, her shoulders heaving with hard sobs.

It came to Kate that never since her babyhood had she seen this child of hers in tears. She held out her arms, infinitely touched. "My dear, my baby!" she said. "Come here to Mother."

But the girl avoided her touch with a sort of shrinking. "All these years we've been trusting you, loving you, almost worshiping you—and you were that sort! Oh, Mother! Your husband's murderer—and his son coming and going about our house as if he were our brother. Those women said something about you and Philip, too,—but never mind that now. Will you tell me the truth, please? Before my father's death, you and—that man—loved each other?"

"Yes, Jemima, but—"

The girl silenced her. "And now that he is coming out of prison, you will go on—being lovers?"

Her mother answered quietly, "I shall marry him, dear, if that is what you mean."

Without another word, the girl turned and went out of the room. Kate hurried after her. "Wait, daughter, I haven't finished. There are some things I must tell you. Where are you going?"

"To tell Jacqueline."

Kate cried out, "No, not Jacqueline! She's too young. Wait, please—"

She followed up the stairs, commanding, pleading. "Wait! I prefer to tell her myself. Please, please! Jemima, do you hear me? I insist."

Jemima never paused. "My sister must know the truth. I owe that much to my father. Young or not, Jacqueline is a Kildare," she said stonily at the door of her room; and shut her mother out into the world of people who were not Kildares.

All that morning the Madam, greatly to the bewilderment of her household, wandered about the house in utter idleness, never stopping; saying to herself reasonably, "I must find something to do. Now is the time to be doing something;" wondering with that helpless, childlike egotism of people in great distress, how the sun happened to be shining so brightly out-of-doors, the birds singing quite as usual.

Invariably her footsteps came back to the door of the room that had been the nursery. It was there the two tiny cribs had stood, the rocking-horse, the doll's house, the little desks at which her babies had lisped their first lessons. It was there they murmured together now through the endless morning, discussing her fate, sitting in final judgment upon their mother.

She could not keep away from the door. Sometimes she pressed against it soundlessly, as if the passionate throbbing of her heart might send a wave through to reach them, to help them understand. How else could she help them to understand? Only by blackening now the memory of a father who was not there to defend himself, a father whom she herself had taught them to respect and to love.

It was an expedient that did not once occur to Kate Kildare.

"My little girls!" she whispered to herself. "My poor little frightened babies!"

If only she had been more with them, had taught them to know her better! In those hours she accused herself of neglecting her children, of leaving them too much to the care of others while she absented herself upon their business. She begrudged, as mothers of dead children begrudge, every necessary moment she had spent away from them. What things were they saying in there, what things were they thinking of their mother?

At last she went upon her knees beside the door, her ear shamelessly at the keyhole. Jemima heard her there, and opened.

She said coldly, "You might have come in, if you wanted so much to hear what we were saying. The door was not locked. We have been deciding where we shall go."

Kate got with difficulty to her feet. "Where you shall go?" she repeated.

Then she thought she understood. Jemima had remembered the terms of her father's will, by which in case of her mother's re-marriage the property of Storm was forfeit.

"Oh, but daughter!"—the words tumbled over each other in their eagerness to be out. "You need not trouble about that! Losing Storm won't matter. You lose only what your father left, and I have doubled that—trebled it. Besides, there is the little property that came to me from my parents. I've always meant, when I married, to give you more than my marriage would cost you. That is why I have worked so hard, and saved. Perhaps you thought me miserly, grasping? I know people do. But that is why. The money is to be yours, all yours and Jacqueline's—at once, not after I die. We shall need very little, Jacques and I. Just a start somewhere—"

The girl stopped the hurrying words with a gesture of some dignity. "We have not thought about the money part yet, Mother. We were simply deciding where to live now."

"To live?" The words were puzzled.

"Yes. Surely you don't expect us to go on living with you and our father's murderer?"

Kate groped at the wall behind her for support. Here was a thing she had not thought of. She had known that she might lose her children's respect, perhaps, temporarily, their love; but she had counted unconsciously upon the force of daily habit, of companionship, of her own personal magnetism, to win back both, as she had won them from others. Deprived of their companionship, what chance had she? They were lost to her, utterly. Yet not even in that bitter moment did it occur to her that she might fail the man who was coming back to her out of his living death.

She said tonelessly, "You are very young to leave your mother. Where could you go?"

The girl had her answer ready. "To my father's aunt Jemima. Now I understand why you and she have not been on good terms. I understand many things now. When she hears that we are leaving you, and why, I think she will be glad to offer us a home."

Kate bowed her head, "And Jacqueline? Is she, too, willing to leave me?"

At this there was a cry from inside the door, and a dishevelled, sobbing figure flung itself into Kate's arms and clung, desperately.

"No, no, no! Don't let her make me. I won't, I won't! She's been saying—oh, terrible things, Mummy! I tried not to listen. She said you didn't love us, you loved him. She said that when he comes—that man, Philip's father—you wouldn't want us around any more. But I know better. No matter who comes, you'll want me, you'll want your baby! Won't you, Mother? Dearest, darlingest Mother!"

"Jacky, don't be so weak," commanded her sister, sternly. "Remember what I told you. Remember our father."

"But I never knew our father. What do I care about him? It's Mummy I want. Whoever she loves, I love. I don't care what she's done! I wouldn't care if she'd killed Father herself—"

"Child, hush, hush!" whispered the trembling woman.

"I wouldn't! I'd just know he needed killing. There, there—" she had her mother's head on her breast now, fondling it, crooning over it as if it were Mag's baby. "Look—you've made her cry!" She stamped a furious foot at her sister. "What are you staring at with your cold, wicked eyes? You told me she was a bad woman—my mother! If she is, then I choose to be bad myself. I'd rather be bad and like her than good as—God. Now, then! Get out of here, you Jemmy Kildare!"

Jemima went. Sternly she closed her door upon the clinging pair, shutting both out together into the world of people who were not Kildares. But they were together.