ght?"

"He didn't say they were engaged or--"

"Well, they were! Everybody knows it; and she broke it off on account of
that serenade when Eugene didn't know what he was doing. He drank when
he was a young man, and she wouldn't stand it, but everybody in this
town knows that Isabel has never really cared for any other man in her
life! Poor Wilbur! He was the only soul alive that didn't know it!"

Nightmare had descended upon the unfortunate George; he leaned back
against the foot-board of his bed, gazing wildly at his aunt. "I believe
I'm going crazy," he said. "You mean when you told me there wasn't any
talk, you told me a falsehood?"

"No!" Fanny gasped.

"You did!"

"I tell you I didn't know how much talk there was, and it wouldn't have
amounted to much if Wilbur had lived." And Fanny completed this with a
fatal admission: "I didn't want you to interfere."

George overlooked the admission; his mind was not now occupied with
analysis. "What do you mean," he asked, "when you say that if father had
lived, the talk wouldn't have amounted to anything?"

"Things might have been--they might have been different."

"You mean Morgan might have married you?"

Fanny gulped. "No. Because I don't know that I'd have accepted him." She
had ceased to weep, and now she sat up stiffly. "I certainly didn't care
enough about him to marry him; I wouldn't have let myself care that
much until he showed that he wished to marry me. I'm not that sort of
person!" The poor lady paid her vanity this piteous little tribute.
"What I mean is, if Wilbur hadn't died, people wouldn't have had it
proved before their very eyes that what they'd been talking about was
true!"

"You say--you say that people believe--" George shuddered, then forced
himself to continue, in a sick voice: "They believe my mother is--is in
love with that man?"

"Of course!"

"And because he comes here--and they see her with him driving--and all
that--they think they were right when they said she was in--in love with
him before--before my father died?"

She looked at him gravely with her eyes now dry between their reddened
lids. "Why, George," she said, gently, "don't you know that's what they
say? You must know that everybody in town thinks they're going to be
married very soon."

George uttered an incoherent cry; and sections of him appeared to
writhe. He was upon the verge of actual nausea.

"You know it!" Fanny cried, getting up. "You don't think I'd have