"She said--'just
once.' She said 'I'd like to have seen him--just once!' She meant--to
tell him good-bye! That's what she meant! And you put this on me, too;
you put this responsibility on me! But I tell you, and I told Uncle
George, that the responsibility isn't all mine! If you were so sure I
was wrong all the time--when I took her away, and when I turned Morgan
out--if you were so sure, what did you let me do it for? You and Uncle
George were grown people, both of you, weren't you? You were older than
I, and if you were so sure you were wiser than I, why did you just stand
around with your hands hanging down, and let me go ahead? You could have
stopped it if it was wrong, couldn't you?"

Fanny shook her head. "No, George," she said slowly. "Nobody could have
stopped you. You were too strong, and--"

"And what?" he demanded loudly.

"And she loved you--too well."

George stared at her hard, then his lower lip began to move
convulsively, and he set his teeth upon it but could not check its
frantic twitching.

He ran out of the room.

She sat still, listening. He had plunged into his mother's room, but
no sound came to Fanny's ears after the sharp closing of the door;
and presently she rose and stepped out into the hall--but could hear
nothing. The heavy black walnut door of Isabel's room, as Fanny's
troubled eyes remained fixed upon it, seemed to become darker and
vaguer; the polished wood took the distant ceiling light, at the end
of the hall, in dim reflections which became mysterious; and to Fanny's
disturbed mind the single sharp point of light on the bronze door-knob
was like a continuous sharp cry in the stillness of night. What
interview was sealed away from human eye and ear within the lonely
darkness on the other side of that door--in that darkness where Isabel's
own special chairs were, and her own special books, and the two great
walnut wardrobes filled with her dresses and wraps? What tragic argument
might be there vainly striving to confute the gentle dead? "In God's
name, what else could I have done?" For his mother's immutable silence
was surely answering him as Isabel in life would never have answered
him, and he was beginning to understand how eloquent the dead can be.
They cannot stop their eloquence, no matter how they have loved the
living: they cannot choose. And so, no matter in what agony George
should cry out, "What else could I have done?" and to the end of his
life no matter how often