the time of her marriage, and Carmen's
guitar, which she had made her own on the day after the flight, and had
kept hidden ever since. She lay on the bed with her cheek pressed to
the guitar, and her eyes hungrily feeding on the face of a woman whose
beauty belonged to spheres other than where she had spent the thirteen
years of her married life.

Zoe had understood more even at the time of the crisis than they thought
she did, child though she was; and as the years had gone on she had
grasped the meaning of it all more clearly perhaps than anyone at all
except her adored friends Judge Carcasson, at whose home she had visited
in Montreal, and M. Fille.

The thing last rumoured about her mother in the parish was that she
had become an actress. To this Zoe made no protest in her mind. It was
better than many other possibilities, and she fixed her mind on it, so
saving herself from other agonizing speculations. In a fixed imagination
lay safety. In her soul she knew that, no matter what happened, her
mother would never return to the Manor Cartier.

The years had not deepened confidence between father and daughter. A
shadow hung between them. They laughed and talked together, were even
boisterous in their fun sometimes, and yet in the eyes of both was the
forbidden thing--the deserted city into which they could not enter. He
could not speak to the child of the shame of her mother; she could not
speak of that in him which had contributed to that mother's shame--the
neglect which existed to some degree in her own life with him. This
was chiefly so because his enterprises had grown to such a number and
height, that he seemed ever to be counting them, ever struggling to the
height, while none of his ventures ever reached that state of success
when it "ran itself", although as years passed men called him rich,
and he spent and loaned money so freely that they called him the Money
Master, or the Money Man Wise, in deference to his philosophy.

Zoe was not beautiful, but there was a wondrous charm in her deep
brown eyes and in the expression of her pretty, if irregular, features.
Sometimes her face seemed as small as that of a young child, and alive
with eerie fancies; and always behind her laughter was something which
got into her eyes, giving them a haunting melancholy. She had no signs
of hysteria, though now and then there came heart-breaking little
outbursts of emotion which had this proof that they were not
hysteria--the