with fatally clear vision. It is fortunate
that Mrs. Ellicott cannot turn over with Nancy that little shelf-full
of memories--all the small places where she was not quite truthful
with Nancy, where she was not quite fair, where she "kept things from
her"--Mrs. Ellicott has always been the kind of woman who believes in
"keeping things from" people as long as possible and then "breaking them
gently." Almost any sort of things.

It is still more fortunate that Mrs. Ellicott cannot see Nancy's eyes as
she reviews all the tiny deceptions, all the petty affairs about which
she was never told or trusted--and all for her own best interests, my
dear, Mrs. Ellicott would most believingly assure her--but when parents
stand so much in Loco Dei to nearly all children--and when the children
have long ago found out that their God is not only a jealous God but one
that must be wheedled and propitiated like an early Jehovah because that
is the only thing to be done with Gods you can't trust--

Nancy doesn't _want_ to believe. She keeps telling herself that she
won't, she absolutely won't unless she absolutely has to. But she is
lucky or unlucky enough to be a person of some intuition--she knows
Oliver, and, also, she knows her mother--though now she is beginning to
think with an empty feeling that she really doesn't know the latter at
all.

What facts there are are rather like Mrs. Ellicott's handwriting--vague
and crossed and illegibly hard to read. But Nancy stares at them all
the time that she is eating her breakfast and responding mechanically to
Mrs. Winters' questions. And then, suddenly, she _knows_.

Mrs. Ellicott like many inexperienced criminals, has committed the
deadly error of letting her mind dwell too long on the _mise-en-scene_
of her crime. And her pen--that tell-tale pen that all her life she has
taken a delight almost sensual in letting run on from unwieldy sentence
to pious formless sentence, has at last betrayed her completely. There
is genuine tragedy in store for Mrs. Ellicott--Nancy in spite of being
modern, is Nancy and will forgive her--but Nancy, for all her trying,
will never quite be able to respect her again.

Nancy doesn't finish her breakfast as neatly as Mrs. Winters would have
wished. She goes into the next room to telephone.

"Business, dear?" says Mrs. Winters brightly from the midst of a last
piece of toast and "Yes--something Mother wants me to do" from Nancy,
unfairly.

Then she gives the