d worked out her salvation,
her atonement; through Lynn full payment had been made.

When he came out of his room, she was in the hall, her face alight with
her great happiness. "Lynn!" she cried. A world of meaning was in the
name.

"I know," he returned, but all the youth was gone out of his voice. At
once she realised that he had crossed the dividing line, that, even to
her, he was no longer a child, but a man.

He went past her, walked downstairs slowly, and went out. "Poor lad!"
she murmured; "poor soul!" Lynn, too, had paid the price--was it needful
that both should pay?

But, none the less, the fact remained; the boon had been granted and
full payment made, in each instance the same payment. She had paid with
long years of heart-hunger, which only now had ceased. Lynn's years
still lay before him.

A sob choked her. Was not the price too high? Must he bear what she had
borne for these five and twenty years? With all the passion of her
motherhood, she yearned to shield him; to eke out, in the remainder of
her days, the remorseless balance against Lynn.

But in the working of that law there is no discrimination--the price is
fixed and unalterable, the payment merciless and sure. There is no
escape for the individual; it is continually the sacrifice of the one
for the many, the part for the whole.

Try as she would, Margaret could not go back. She could not, for Lynn's
sake, take up the burden she had laid down, in the futile effort to bear
more. From her, no more would be accepted, so much was plain. The rest
must come from Lynn.

Her heart ached for him, but there was nothing she could do, except to
stand aside and watch, while his broad shoulders grew accustomed to
their load. A wild impulse seized her to go to the city, find Iris,
bring her back, even unwillingly, and literally force her to marry
Lynn. But that was not what Lynn wanted, and Margaret herself had been
forced into a marriage. Clearly, at last, she saw that she must remain
passive, and cultivate resignation.

The hours went by and Lynn did not return. She well knew the mood in
which he had gone away. At night, white-faced and weary, with his eyes
gleaming strangely, he would come back, refuse to eat, and lock himself
into his room. It had been so for a long time and it would be so until,
through the slow working of the inner forces, he stepped over the
boundary that his mother had just crossed.

White noon ascended the arch of the heave