she would be
able to bear it.

Each day she went to the grave on the hillside, and carefully ordered
the planting of the place so that it should be surrounded with flowers
that she liked. Also she laid out a little shrub-bordered path to be
made from the pool beside the orangery to the hillside. In these ways
she displayed her concrete habit of thought. For the rest she sat or lay
upon her bed, seeing nothing, probably thinking very little. It was a
form of torpor, and after it had continued for a week or ten days, her
maid was for sending for a doctor. That functionary merely talked
platitudes that Adelle neither understood nor heeded. The maid would
have tried a priest, but feared to suggest it to her mistress.

The truth was that Adelle was recovering very slowly from her shock. She
was only twenty-five and strong. Her body held many years of activity,
possibly other children, and her mind still awaited its full
development. How that would come was the really vital matter. The
ordinary result would be that, after the full period of lethargy and
physical and mental recuperation, Adelle should drift back into
something like the same life she had previously led. She would go abroad
and establish herself in a new environment, gradually acquiring new
associations that in time would efface the more poignant surfaces of her
tragedy at Highcourt. She would probably marry again, for she was still
a young woman and had a considerable remnant of her fortune. She might
reasonably expect more children to come to her, and thus, with certain
modifications due to her experiences with Archie, live out an average
life of ease and personal interests in the manner of that class that the
probate court and the laws of our civilization had made it possible for
her to join.

But all that conventional resolution of her destiny was not to be
because of ideas already at work within her--the sole vital remains from
her previous life. Even in her dullest moments of physical and mental
hebetude she felt something pressing upon her from within for
accomplishment, like a piece of unfinished business that she must
presently rouse herself to put through. She scarcely knew what it was
until she made an effort to think it out, and for days she did not make
this effort.

Gradually she focussed more concretely this unconscious weight upon her
soul. It had to do with the stone mason and his rights to his
grandfather's inheritance. She must see him b