When Marcia and the little milliner finished compiling the bill for the length of time that Marcia had boarded and cared for Jason, they did not know what to do with it. They were in doubt as to whether they should present it at once or wait until the Morelands made their move and then use the bill to counteract it. They discussed every phase of the situation repeatedly. They waited what seemed to them a long time, and at last it was Marcia who reached a decision for both of them.

“I simply refuse to live in this uncertainty any longer,” she said to Nancy. “I’m going to take this bill to Ashwater. Albert Rich is the best lawyer there. In the old days I did a great deal of work for Mrs. Rich. I believe that he is a considerate man. I know that he has no cause to love Martin Moreland. I’m going to tell him what I think is necessary. I’m going to ask his opinion. I’m tired shivering and shaking and being tortured with fear. I realize that Martin Moreland’s hand is heavy, but after all, there are two things that are stronger than he—one is public opinion and the other is God. Both of them would be against him if the truth were known.”

Nancy thought deeply.

“You are right,” she said. “It isn’t fair that he should keep us shivering and shaking and make our days unhappy and our nights a terror. Go to Ashwater. Tell this Albert Rich what you think is necessary. I can’t see that you need to go into full detail. Make him understand only what is essential.”

“All right,” said Marcia, “I’m going.”

Nancy put the kettle to boil and brewed a cup of strong tea while Marcia was dressing, for it could be seen that she was labouring under heavy mental strain. Nancy followed her to the corner where Marcia took the daily omnibus that ran between the two towns. She kissed her good-bye and clung to her hands with a reassuring grip. After she had gone back to the shop, she condemned herself that she had allowed Marcia to go alone. She felt niggardly. Why did people let their fear of losing a few pennies intervene when matters concerning their hearts and their souls were at stake? What was money that it should make such dreadful things of men and women? After all, men had made money; it was an emanation of their brain. It was not one of the things that God had made. It was an invention by which man, himself, had put upon his soul such shackles as the Almighty never would have imposed. She wondered why she had not locked the door and let people think what they would. Was there any woman in Bluffport who needed a hat so badly that she could not have waited one day while Nancy sat beside Marcia and gave her the comfort of the grip of her hand, the sound of her voice, the chance to say a word here and there that might have distracted her mind from its burden?

Nancy sat trying to think how she would feel if her soul were stained with the red secret that she realized never ceased to burn and to eat into the consciousness of her friend. And because she was her friend, and because she had learned to love Marcia as she loved no one else, the big tears rolled down her cheeks and several times that day she sewed their stains under deftly folded velvet.

When Marcia stepped from the omnibus at the courthouse corner in Ashwater, she realized that some disaster had overtaken the town. Here and there she saw women weeping and wringing their hands. Little children scuttled past with terrified faces. Half-grown boys went running in one direction, their faces small mirrors of their elders’, their arms loaded with sticks, with bricks, with stones. Men hurried past, some of them carrying antiquated firearms on their shoulders, flintlocks, and old army muskets; some of them with guns of modern make, with revolvers; and there were men in that crowd who carried a grubbing hoe, the blade of a scythe, a hickory “knockmaul,” or an axe.

She had difficulty in finding any one who would stop long enough to tell her about the brain-storm that was sweeping Ashwater, but soon she had the essentials of what had occurred from people with whom she talked upon the street. She struggled for self-control, but in spite of herself she grew terribly excited over the recitation of the tragedy that the Morelands had worked in the lives of Rebecca Sampson, of Mahala, of Jason, of hundreds of other people.

She had known Rebecca all the years of her residence in Ashwater. She at once understood that Martin Moreland had lured her, Marcia, from her home in an adjoining county to the little house in which she had lived for so many years, for the sole purpose of using her as his tool in taking care of Jason. He had made love to her in the most alluring manner possible to him, and hers had been a nature that gave without question and without fear. For him she had sacrificed relatives and friends and gone with him willingly. Both the questioning and the fear she now knew came later, and in an intensified form. What she realized was, that, through all the best years of her life, under cover of a menial task, she had been merely a servant for Martin Moreland. It was not true that he was bound in an unhappy marriage from which he was vainly striving to free himself, as he had told her in the beginning. He had never meant to free himself. He had never intended to offer her marriage and an honourable position. He had planned to take everything she had to give; to have her take care of the boy, for whom she had always struggled to keep from forming an attachment, because the threat had hung over her that any minute he chose Martin Moreland would take him away.

Her mind was milling over her own problem; there then came the problem of Rebecca Sampson, and she saw, that even before he had determined on the wreck of her life, Rebecca had gone down; yet these people were saying that he had admitted that he was legally married to her. Rebecca had been weak, a clinging thing, a tender, delicate girl; yet she had a spirit and a resistance that he could not break; so he had been forced to marry her. No one on the streets knew from where she had come or who her people were. They remembered that a young thing lacking mentality was sheltered by a little house in the outskirts. The few who had tried to make friends with her in the beginning had been repulsed with insane spasms so menacing that they had allowed her to go her way, as people in that day were permitted to go, even though it was known that they lacked balanced mentality.

Finally, in her mental milling, Marcia reached Mahala, and her soul sickened over the things that people on the street were saying. By the hour she had handled Mahala’s little undergarments and wash dresses. She had mended the delicate laces and the embroideries that Elizabeth Spellman’s fingers had fashioned. Through the papers and Bluffport gossip, she had heard of the tragedy that had overtaken her. She had talked it over with Nancy, and she had said to her: “To save my life, I cannot believe that Mahala Spellman ever laid her fingers upon anything that did not belong to her. There must have been some reason, there must have been some plan on the part of the Morelands to ruin her. If there was property they could get by doing it, the wreck of a woman’s life would not stop them.”

Now the motive was furnished. Albert Rich had not hesitated, when the crisis came, to tell people why Junior wanted to do anything that would hurt and humiliate Mahala.

Finally, she reached Jason. She found herself saying aloud: “Jason was a good boy. If I had been permitted, I could have made life different for him.”

Not knowing what the outcome of the trouble in Ashwater would be, Marcia felt that since the Morelands had come into the open and were doing terrible things to other people, her time would soon come. They would crush her as they had crushed Rebecca, Mahala and her mother, Mr. Spellman and the other men who had fallen into their power in a financial way—these other men who were raging up and down before the courthouse block in the main business square of the town, like blood-thirsty hyenas.

It seemed to Marcia that in order to collect her thoughts, she must get away from people, she must go where her mind would not be diverted by what she was seeing and hearing on the streets. She had thought that she might find refuge in the office of Albert Rich, and she had gone there, but it was locked and when she inquired for him, she had been told that he was in the bank. No one knew what was happening there or when he could be seen. Then Marcia followed an impulse she could not define, did not realize that she was following. Her face turned to a familiar direction; her feet carried her on a well-known path. She went straight to the house in the outskirts where she and Jason had spent so many years together. The whole place had been changed. It was now comfortable. It was gay with paint; there was grass in the dooryard; there were flowers blooming in small round and square beds and lining the inside of the new fence. There was a carefully tended garden, but she could see no one and hear no one as she paced up and down before it. She thought that the people, who evidently were living happily there, must have been drawn down town by the excitement.

Being very tired, Marcia went slowly up the walk. She sat on a chair on the veranda shaded by the big, widely branching maple tree, and there she tried to think. It was quiet and a robin was singing in the branches, but she found that her brain, her heart and her blood, were in such turmoil that she was unable to sit still. So she left the veranda, and following the street to where it reached the country, she took up a foot path across a meadow and at last she entered the wood behind the house where Jason had taken refuge as a child.

Tired out at last, she sat on a log in the stillness of the deep wood, and there she tried again to think. But she found that instead of thinking, she was seeing things. As she looked at the dark floor of the forest with the great trees, the thickness of the bushes, she began to see a vision of the night of horror that a terrified boy must have spent there when he fled before the wrath of Martin Moreland. As if she really had shared that night with him she saw the things that had tortured him. She visioned his return to the deserted house and his grief and loneliness when he had found himself abandoned. She remembered what she had been told of the success that he had made of life, of how he had prospered in partnership with Peter Potter, and how his love of land had culminated in his efforts for Mahala and himself.

Into her vision there came the pathetic figure of Rebecca, hiding the bloom and the beauty of her young face, proclaiming herself everywhere she went with her self-imposed emblem of purity, trying to convey to others the belief that possessed her that her soul was white even as she suffered torments in the fear that it was scarlet. Marcia thought of the long path over which Rebecca had journeyed. She even tried a mental estimate of the hundreds of miles that one woman’s feet had travelled, driven in insane unrest from point to point. She recalled having been told that in three different states the white flag had been seen, a voice had been bravely lifted exhorting every one to acknowledge the love of the Saviour, His power to heal. Marcia, in imagination, saw Rebecca’s waving banner gleaming in the light, her tireless eyes always searching from side to side, looking at the arms of every person carrying a child, peering into the little buggies in which women dragged after them the babies they had brought into life through love, and were permitted to keep. She thought of Rebecca a long time and wondered who her people might have been and where her home might be; she thought of the price that she had paid to protect her honour, and very slowly a resolve began forming in Marcia’s heart.

Into her vision Mahala came flying down the village street, her feet scattering the gold and red leaves of the maples of autumn, her broad hat hanging across her throat by its ties, her pretty, wide skirts blown around her, as she dexterously rolled a gay hoop before her. She thought of the girl’s youth and her beauty, and of how she had been stripped of her parents, her home, her friends, and worse than all that, of her honour.

Then Marcia saw a woman coming toward her through the forest, a woman of her own height and form, a woman of her own face, but she wore a long, trailing robe of scarlet, and she was lost. Her outstretched hands seemed to be feeling their way, her eyes were not efficient; they were looking up, but they were not helping her feet to find the path. Sometimes as Marcia saw her in a shaft of sunlight, there was the hope in her heart that the stumbling creature might find the way; sometimes she saw her standing lost in deep darkness, but always one hand was covering her heart, and always she was stumbling over the scarlet robe that trailed around her and seemed to creep up to her arms and her shoulders like the hot scorching of a flame.

Finally, the figures of the two Morelands came through the forest. They were like giants that had broken into the wood. They did not seem to be made of flesh and blood; they did not seem to be men like Mahlon Spellman and Albert Rich and Doctor Grayson and the Presbyterian minister; they seemed to be made of bronze or iron, while their hands were huge, without hesitation crushing little children, frail women, and weaker men; they reached out and wrested from people their homes, their most precious possessions, and with heavy feet they trampled upon everything that came in their path.

Then she saw the son leave the father and advance toward her, his unsparing hands outstretched, his feet ready to trample, on his face the sneer that had been there when he had entered her place of business and found enjoyment in dealing the blow that had struck the light from her eyes and hope from her heart.

Suddenly, Marcia arose and slipped through the wood in the dark, inconspicuous dress she had selected to wear. When she came to the open, she was amazed to find that it was night. Fully half the day she had struggled alone in the forest. She came from it with one determination fixed in her mind. She went to the business part of the town, being unnoticed among the throngs that still crowded the streets, until she reached the bank. She was familiar with the back part of it. She watched her chance, slipped down the alley, climbed the back stairs, and tried the door. It was locked, but she easily climbed through the open window into the room that bore Junior’s name above the side stairs.

The flares of light on the street lit the office intermittently. She walked around the room. She went to Junior’s big desk; she sat down in his chair in front of it. She looked over the books and the litter of papers that were piled on it. She moved slowly and deliberately. Then she began opening the drawers in front of her. In the top right-hand one lay a big revolver. It seemed to fascinate her. She picked it up and fitted it to her hand. She laid her fingers upon the trigger. Then she heard a rush of footsteps coming up the inside stairway from the private room of Martin Moreland. Snatching up the revolver, she shoved the drawer shut, and running across the room, entered a closet the door of which was standing slightly ajar.