r attention to her plate of buttered toast and her cup
of coffee. She was chagrined to think that she had fallen so easily into
Mrs. Richards's very obvious traps. Not that it mattered. She was quite
sure that the truth could not harm Stillman, and she was equally sure
that her position in life was too obscure to stand out conspicuously
against the darts of Mrs. Richards's vindictive tongue. But she had the
pride of her reticences and she did not like to surrender these
privileges at the point of insolent curiosity. The two continued to eat
in silence.

It was Mrs. Richards who finished first, and she dipped her fingers
hurriedly into the battered metal finger-bowl which the Japanese bus-boy
thrust before her.

"Do you mind if I go along?" she inquired of Claire, with an air of
polite triumph. "I think I'll go forward where I can get a quick start
... before the crowd gets too thick. I've got a million errands to do
before nine o'clock. And I _do_ want to run into the office before
Gertie settles down to work. I haven't seen her for a week and I've got
_more_ things to tell her!"

CHAPTER VIII

"Why, Miss Claire, how could you! Where have you been? And your mother
in such a bad way!" Mrs. Finnegan broke into sudden tears.

Claire, fumbling in her bag for the front-door key, looked up. Mrs.
Finnegan had swung open the door to the Robson flat and she stood like a
vision of disaster upon the threshold.

"What has happened?" Claire's voice rose with a note of swift
apprehension.

"Your mother ... she's paralyzed! She was taken last night. The doctor
says it would have happened, anyway. But I say it was worry, that's what
it was. With you away all night and never a word!"

Claire climbed the stairs in silence, aware that Mrs. Finnegan was
following at a discreet distance. Already the house seemed permeated
with an atmosphere of tragedy and gloom in spite of the morning light
pouring in unscreened at every window. Mrs. Robson's room was the only
exception to this unusual excess of cold radiance--unusual, because it
was one of Mrs. Robson's prides to keep her window-shades lowered to a
uniform and genteel distance.

Until Claire came face to face with her mother she almost had fancied
that her neighbor was indulging in a crude and terrible joke, but one
look sufficed. Mrs. Robson lay staring vacantly at the ceiling; she
could not move, she could not speak, and her spirit showed through the
veiled light in her