moniously. But
instantly she rose to her feet. She had no need to ask what had
happened. The girl's face told her.

"Mother!" Jemima's voice was hoarse. "Is it true that--Philip's
father--is coming out of the penitentiary?"

Kate inclined her head, paling.

"And that you are getting him out?"

"Philip and I together."

"Why?"

Kate did not answer. She was struggling to collect her wits for this
sudden necessity.

Jemima came quite close, searching her face with curious grimness; and
Kate saw the resemblance the old man had seen, and shivered.

"Mother, that was not the only news I heard at the store. I overheard
some women talking. They said--"

"Surely we need not concern ourselves with village gossip, my child!"
Kate was fighting for time.

But the appeal to the girl's pride went for once unheeded. "If they
lied," she said tensely, "they must be punished for it. If they did
not--Mother, what they said was that my father was not killed by
accident. They said the man who killed him was Dr. Benoix. They
said--why."

Kate moistened her lips. The time had come to speak, to explain what she
could, to lie if necessary--anything to wipe out of her child's face
that look of frozen horror.

But her tongue refused her bidding. She was hypnotized by the
realization of her own utter folly. To have left such a discovery to
chance! To have hoped that some impossible luck would keep her daughters
in ignorance of her tragedy--and this in a rural community where nothing
is ever forgotten, where every sordid detail of its one great scandal
had been for years a household word!

The two stared at each other. Slowly the ruthless inquiry in the girl's
eyes changed into fear, into a very piteous dismay. "Can't you
deny--anything?" she whispered at last. "Mother! say it isn't so. I'll
believe you."

She began to cry; not weakly with hidden face, but as a man cries,
painful tears rolling unheeded down her cheeks, her shoulders heaving
with hard sobs.

It came to Kate that never since her babyhood had she seen this child of
hers in tears. She held out her arms, infinitely touched. "My dear, my
baby!" she said. "Come here to Mother."

But the girl avoided her touch with a sort of shrinking. "All these
years we've been trusting you, loving you, almost worshiping you--and
you were _that sort_! Oh, Mother! Your husband's murderer--and his son
coming and going about our house as if he were our brother. Those women
said someth