e. He felt that it was himself, and yet in
a way closer than himself. Until that dreadful time in New York I never
understood what his work may mean to a man."

"I wish you could have gone with him, Jinny."

"I couldn't," replied Virginia, as she had replied so often before. "I
know Harry doesn't look sick," she went on with that soft obstinacy
which never attacked and yet never yielded a point, "but something tells
me that he isn't well."

An hour later, when she put him to bed, he looked so gay and rosy that
she almost allowed herself the weakness of a regret. Suppose nothing was
wrong, after all? Suppose, as Oliver had said, she was merely
"sensational"? While she undressed in the dark for fear of awaking
Jenny, who was sleeping soundly in her crib on Virginia's side of the
bed, her mind went back over the two harrowing days through which she
had just lived, and she asked herself, not if she had triumphed for good
over Abby, but if she had really done what was right both for Oliver and
the children. After all, the whole of life came back simply to doing the
thing that was right. So unused was she to the kind of introspection
which weighs emotions as if they were facts, that she thought slowly,
from sheer lack of practice in the subtler processes of reasoning.
Worry, the plain, ordinary sort of worry with which she was unhappily
familiar, had not prepared her for the piercing anguish which follows
the probing of the open wounds in one's soul. To lie sleepless over
butchers' bills was different, somehow, from lying sleepless over the
possible loss of Oliver's love. It was different, and yet, just as she
had asked herself over and over again on those other nights if she had
done right to run up so large an account at Mr. Dewlap's, so she
questioned her conscience now in the hope of finding justification for
Oliver. "Ought I to have gone on the hunt yesterday?" she asked
kneeling, with sore and aching limbs, by the bedside. "Had I a right to
risk my life when the children are so young that they need me every
minute? It is true nothing happened. Providence watched over me; but,
then, something might have happened, and I could have blamed only
myself. I was jealous--for the first time in my life, I was jealous--and
because I was jealous, I did wrong and neglected my duty. Yesterday I
sacrificed the children to Oliver, and to-day I sacrificed Oliver to the
children. I love Oliver as much, but I have made the children. The