serted wife and causing her later to break. There
were greedy wonderings as to whether she could possibly have seen Ruth
Holland, whether anything had happened that they did not know about.

Late one December afternoon Mrs. Williams came home from a church bazaar
and curtly telephoned that she would not be back for the evening. She
spoke of a headache. And her head did ache. It ached, she bitterly
reflected, from being looked at, from knowing they were taking
observations for subsequent speculation. She had been in charge of a
table at the bazaar; a number of little things had gone wrong and she
got out of patience with one of her assistants. Other people got
irritated upon occasions of that sort--and that was all there was to it.
But she was not at liberty to show annoyance. She knew at the time that
they were whispering around about it, connecting it with the thing about
her that it seemed never really went out of their minds. The sense of
that had made her really angry and she had said sharp things she knew
she would be sorry for because they would just be turned over as part of
the thing that was everlastingly being turned over. She was not free;
they were always watching her; even after all these years always
thinking that everything had something to do with _that_.

Mrs. Hughes, her housekeeper and cook, had followed her upstairs. At the
door of her room she turned impatiently. She had known by the way the
woman hung around downstairs that she wanted to say something to her and
she had petulantly not given her the chance. She did not want anything
said to her. She wanted to be let alone.

"Well?" she inquired ungraciously.

Mrs. Hughes was a small trim woman who had a look of modestly trying not
to be obtrusive about her many virtues. She had now that manner of one
who could be depended upon to assume responsibilities a less worthy
person would pass by.

"I thought perhaps you should know, Mrs. Williams," she said with
faintly rebuking patience, "that Lily has gone to bed."

"Oh, she's really sick then, is she?" asked Mrs. Williams, unbending a
little.

"She says so," replied Mrs. Hughes.

The tone caused her to look at the woman in surprise. "Well, I presume
she is then," she answered sharply.

Lily was the second girl. Two servants were not needed for the actual
work as the household consisted only of Mrs. Williams and an aged aunt
who had lived with her since she had been alone, but the house itself