t then. "Yes! Offered you?--Good Heavens, I insisted upon
it! Oh, what a fool I have been, what a blind, blundering fool! Now I
understand why he was so queer, so quiet.--Taking advantage of his
devotion to shunt my disgrace onto him--Jacques' son!"

At last her anger exhausted her, and she sank into a chair, quite limp
and silent. She did not know just when Jacqueline left the house, had
been only vaguely aware of a horse galloping down the hill recklessly,
as Jacqueline, like her father before her, was wont to gallop. In the
reaction of emotion, she felt rather ill, and had to struggle with a
physical weakness that threatened to overcome her.

Some time later a servant, entering to announce supper, found her there
in the dark, and receiving no reply to her summons, ran back to the
kitchen in some alarm.

Big Liza, with the wisdom of the simple, herself brought a tray of
nourishing food, and stood over her mistress firmly while she ate,
obediently enough, but tasting nothing of what she put into her mouth.

Presently, however, the food had its effect. Weakness passed; and Kate
found that her anger had dissipated, leaving only a great, aching
sorrow, not only for her daughter, but with her. Philip receded to the
back of her mind. Channing was there only as one is aware of the
presence of some crawling, hidden thing in the grass, whom one intends
presently to crush with a heel. All her thoughts rested now upon
Jacqueline.

She saw her as she had cowered away from that torrent of wrath, her
tearless, strained eyes fixed incredulously upon the mother who was
hurting her. She remembered all her little tender, clinging ways, her
piteous loyalty to the man who had deserted her, her gallant effort to
bear gaily the load of fear that must for so long have been upon her
heart. She remembered farther back than that--her fierce rage with the
accusing Jemima, her arms wound tight about the mother whose weakness
she had learned, her cry, "If she is bad, then I'll be bad, too! I'd
rather be bad like her than good as--as God!"

Kate began to shiver. She, the defender of Mag Henderson, of all weak
and helpless creatures, she had failed her own daughter!...

Her mind went still further back into the past, and recalled the scene
between herself and Jacques Benoix, when she had offered herself to him,
when only the fact that her lover was stronger than herself had kept her
from far worse sinning than Jacqueline's--worse, because le