memory to the other Billy whom she loved. Wine in, wit out, she
repeated to herself; but the phrase could not absolve the man who had
slept by her side, and to whom she had consecrated herself. She wept
in the loneliness of the all-too-spacious bed, strove to forget Billy's
incomprehensible cruelty, even pillowed her cheek with numb fondness
against the bruise of her arm; but still resentment burned within her,
a steady flame of protest against Billy and all that Billy had done. Her
throat was parched, a dull ache never ceased in her breast, and she was
oppressed by a feeling of goneness. WHY, WHY?--And from the puzzle of
the world came no solution.

In the morning she received a visit from Sarah--the second in all the
period of her marriage; and she could easily guess her sister-in-law's
ghoulish errand. No exertion was required for the assertion of all of
Saxon's pride. She refused to be in the slightest on the defensive.
There was nothing to defend, nothing to explain. Everything was all
right, and it was nobody's business anyway. This attitude but served to
vex Sarah.

"I warned you, and you can't say I didn't," her diatribe ran. "I always
knew he was no good, a jailbird, a hoodlum, a slugger. My heart sunk
into my boots when I heard you was runnin' with a prizefighter. I
told you so at the time. But no; you wouldn't listen, you with your
highfalutin' notions an' more pairs of shoes than any decent woman
should have. You knew better'n me. An' I said then, to Tom, I said,
'It's all up with Saxon now.' Them was my very words. Them that touches
pitch is defiled. If you'd only a-married Charley Long! Then the family
wouldn't a-ben disgraced. An' this is only the beginnin', mark me, only
the beginnin'. Where it'll end, God knows. He'll kill somebody yet, that
plug-ugly of yourn, an' be hanged for it. You wait an' see, that's all,
an' then you'll remember my words. As you make your bed, so you will lay
in it"

"Best bed I ever had," Saxon commented.

"So you can say, so you can say," Sarah snorted.

"I wouldn't trade it for a queen's bed," Saxon added.

"A jailbird's bed," Sarah rejoined witheringly.

"Oh, it's the style," Saxon retorted airily. "Everybody's getting
a taste of jail. Wasn't Tom arrested at some street meeting of the
socialists? Everybody goes to jail these days."

The barb had struck home.

"But Tom was acquitted," Sarah hastened to proclaim.

"Just the same he lay in jail all night without ba