ral times and on those times had
seen what I saw later, but I had been away. I could not question him and
he was, above everything, scrupulously exact in keeping the confidences
of his patients--even with me. At any rate, I was called in to see Mrs.
Drainger as my father's son. I saw for the first time that her face was
entirely shrouded in the thick black veil she wore ever after; and the
wearing of that veil dates, I think, from the night that Charlie Brede
and Emily Drainger looked with baffled wonder into each other's eyes.

"Imagine living with the thing. Imagine the torture of patience, the
fixity of will required to keep it eternally on. Do you know how
bandages feel after a time? Think of shrouding your head for twenty
years. But think also of the slow stealthiness with which the mute
reproach of that shrouded face would creep into your nerves if you had
to live with it; think of the imaginative persistency which saw, in this
covering of the features, not merely just the tie that would hold Emily
to her forever, but the tedious process of revenge for an injury not
known to us, for some monstrous moment between the two that only the
dull walls of the house could hear.

"Think, too, of the ingenuity of that symbol. Its very helplessness
forbade to Emily the exultation of revilement. Good Heavens! It is bad
enough to be tied by your own weakness to a face that you hate, but to
be chained forever to that thing, to rise up with it and lie down with
it, to talk to it, to insult it, to listen to it, and yet never see your
sarcasms strike home! Think of hating a black veil for twenty years!

"Emily, of course, had changed. She met me at the door as she met you.
She was a shell burned out by one fierce moment of fire. Something had
toppled in her and collapsed, and only by the pitiless and continual
irony of her silence could she hide her inward loathing. With me she was
proud and acid, but in her mother's room, whither she led me, her
silence was like a frightened, defensive covering which might, at any
moment, be stripped from her, leaving her indecently, almost physically
bare. Her pride, in sum, was broken, but not her hatred. That smoldered
where before it had flamed.

"Mrs. Drainger had some minor complaint, I have forgotten what. Emily
followed me into the room where she sat--she seems to me always to have
been sitting with patient intensity in some corner of that house. I
recall the stab of surprise with which