him. It showed her worse than those who justified this thing,
the enormity of which she had seemed to understand well.

"You mustn't blame her too much," came Lydia Sessions's smooth voice.
"John's mother is a widow, and girls of that age like pretty clothes and
a good time. Some people consider John very handsome, and of course with
an ignorant young woman of that class, flattery is likely to turn the
head. I think she does as well as could be expected."

CHAPTER XVI

BITTER WATERS

Johnnie had a set of small volumes of English verse, extensively
annotated by his own hand, which Stoddard had brought to her early in
their acquaintance, leaving it with her more as a gift than as a loan.
She kept these little books after all the others had gone back. She had
read and reread them--cullings from Chaucer, from Spenser, from the
Elizabethan lyrists, the border balladry, fierce, tender, oh, so
human--till she knew pages of them by heart, and their vocabulary
influenced her own, their imagery tinged all her leisure thoughts. It
seemed to her, whenever she debated returning them, that she could not
bear it. She would get them out and sit with one of them open in her
hands, not reading, but staring at the pages with unseeing eyes, passing
her fingers over it, as one strokes a beloved hand, or turning through
each book only to find the pencilled words in the margins. She would be
giving up part of herself when she took these back.

Yet it had to be done, and one miserable morning she made them all into
a neat package, intending to carry them to the mill and place them on
Stoddard's desk thus early, when nobody would be in the office. Then the
children came in; Deanie was half sick; and in the distress of getting
the ailing child comfortably into her own bed, Johnnie forgot the books.
Taking them in at noon, she met Stoddard himself.

"I've brought you back your--those little books of Old English Poetry,"
she said, with a sudden constriction in her throat, and a quick burning
flush that suffused brow, cheek and neck.

Stoddard looked at her; she was thinner than she had been, and otherwise
showed the marks of misery and of factory life. The sight was almost
intolerable to him. Poor girl, she herself was suffering cruelly enough
beneath the same yoke she had helped to lay on the children.

"Are you really giving up your studies entirely?" he asked, in what he
tried to make a very kindly voice. He laid his hand on the pa