was no eagerness or uplift or even trouble at the name of Jeff.

"Father came this afternoon," said Lydia. "He wanted to talk things over. He couldn't get in."

"Oh," said Esther, "I'm sorry for that. So you are one of the step-children. Sit down, won't you. Oh, do take this chair."

Lydia was only too glad to take any chair and get the strain off her trembling knees. It was no trivial task, she saw, to face Jeff's wife and drag her back to wifehood. But she ignored the proffer of the softer chair. It was easier to take a straight one and sit upright, her brown little hands clenched tremblingly. Esther, too, took a chair the twin of hers, as if to accept no advantage; she sat with dignity and waited gravely. She seemed to be watchful, intent, yet bounded by reserves. It was the attitude of waiting for attack.

"This very next week, you know, Jeff will be discharged." Lydia spoke with the brutality born of her desperation. Still Esther watched her. "You know, don't you?" Lydia hurled at her. She had a momentary thought, "The woman is a fool." "From jail," she continued. "From the Federal Prison. You know, don't you? You heard he had been pardoned?"

Esther looked at her a full minute, her face slowly suffusing. Lydia saw the colour even flooding into her neck. Her eyes did not fill, but they deepened in some unusual way. They seemed to be saying, defiantly perhaps, that they could cry if they would, but they had other modes of empery.

"You know, don't you?" Lydia repeated, but more gently. She began to wonder now whether trouble had weakened the wife's brain, her power at least of receptivity.

"Yes," said Esther. "I know it, of course. To-day's paper had quite a long synopsis of the case."

Now Lydia flushed and looked defiant.

"I am glad to know that," she said. "I must burn the paper. Farvie sha'n't see it."

"There were two reporters here yesterday," said Esther. She spoke angrily now. Her voice hinted that this was an indignity which need not have been put upon her.

"Did you see them?" asked Lydia, in a flash, ready to blame her whatever she did.

But the answer was eloquent with reproach.

"Certainly I didn't see them. I have never seen any of them. When that horrible newspaper started trying to get him pardoned, reporters came here in shoals. I never saw them. I'd have died sooner."

"Did Jeff write you he didn't want to be pardoned? He did us."

"No. He hasn't written me for years."

She looked a baffling number of things now, voluntarily pathetic, a little scornful, as if she washed her hands gladly of the whole affair.

"Farvie thinks," said Lydia recklessly, "that you haven't written to him."

"How could I?" asked Esther, in a quick rebuttal which actually had a convincing sound, "when he didn't write to me?"

"But he was in prison."

"He hasn't had everything to bear," said Esther, rising and putting some figurines right on the mantel where they seemed to be right enough before. "Do you know any woman whose life has been ruined as mine has? Have you ever met one? Now have you?"

"Farvie's life is ruined," said Lydia incisively. "Jeff's life is ruined, too. I don't know whether it's any worse for a woman than for a man."

"Jeffrey," said Esther, "is taking the consequences of his own act."

"You don't mean to tell me you think he was to blame?" Lydia said, in a low tone charged with her own complexity of sentiment. She was horror-stricken chiefly. Esther saw that, and looked at her in a large amaze.

"You don't mean to tell me you think he wasn't?" she countered.

"Why, of course he wasn't!" Lydia's cheeks were flaming. She was impatiently conscious of this heat and her excited breath. But she had entered the fray, and there was no returning.

"Then who was guilty?" Esther asked it almost triumphantly, as if the point of proving herself right were more to her than the innocence of Jeff.

"That's for us to find out," said Lydia. She looked like the apostle of a holy war.

"But if you could find out, why haven't you done it before? Why have you waited all these years?"

"Partly because we weren't grown up, Anne and I. And even when we were, when we'd begun to think about it, we were giving dancing lessons, to help out. You know Farvie put almost every cent he had into paying the creditors, and then it was only a drop in the bucket. And besides Jeff pleaded guilty, and he kept writing Farvie to let it all stand as it was, and somehow, we were so sorry for Jeff we couldn't help feeling he'd got to have his way. Even if he wanted to sacrifice himself he ought to be allowed to, because he couldn't have his way about anything else. At least, that was what Anne and I felt. We've talked it over a lot. We've hardly talked of anything else. And we think Farvie feels so, too."

"You speak as if it were a sum of money he'd stolen out of a drawer," said Esther. Her cheeks were red, like exquisite roses. "It wasn't a sum of money. I read it all over in the paper the other day. He had stockholders' money, and he plunged, it said, just before the panic. He invested other people's money in the wrong things, and then, it said, he tried to realise."

"I can't help it," said Lydia doggedly. "He wasn't guilty."

"Why should he have said he was guilty?" Esther put this to her with her unchanged air of triumphant cruelty.

"He might, to save somebody else."

Esther was staring now and Lydia stared back, caught by the almost terrified surprise in Esther's face. Did she know about Jim Reardon? But Esther broke the silence, not in confession, if she did know: with violence rather.

"You never will prove any such thing. Never in the world. The money was in Jeff's hands. He hadn't even a partner."

"He had friends," said Lydia. But now she felt she had implied more than was discreet, and she put a sign up mentally not to go that way. Whatever Esther said, she would keep her own eyes on the sign.