the very first day that they
met, Mrs. Talcott, when she came back, she asked me to try and make him
like her. She was so sweet, so magnanimous," her voice trembled. Oh the
deep relief, so deep that it seemed to cut like a knife--of remembering,
pressing to her, what Tante had done for her, endured for her! "So
sweet, so magnanimous, Mrs. Talcott. She did all that she could--and so
did I--to give him time. For it was not that I lacked love for my
husband. No. I loved him. More, even more, than I loved Tante. There was
perhaps the wrong. I was perhaps cowardly, for his sake. I would not
see. And it was all useless. It grew worse and worse. He was not rude to
her. It was not that. It was worse. He was so careful--oh I see it
now--not to put himself in the wrong. He tried, instead, to put her in
the wrong. He misread every word and look. He sneered--oh, I saw it, and
shut my eyes--at her little foibles and weaknesses; why should she not
have them as well as other people, Mrs. Talcott? And he was
blind--blind--blind," Karen's voice trembled more violently, "to all the
rest. So that it had to end," she went on in broken sentences. "Tante
went because she could bear it no longer. And because she saw that I
could bear it no longer. She hoped, by leaving me, to save my happiness.
But that could not be. Mrs. Talcott, even then I might have tried to go
on living with that chasm--between Tante and my husband--in my life; but
I learned the whole truth as even I hadn't seen it; as even she hadn't
seen it. Mrs. Forrester came to me, Mrs. Talcott, and told me what
Gregory had said to her of Tante. He believes her a malignant woman,"
said Karen, repeating her former words and rising as she spoke. "And to
me he did not deny it. Everything, then, was finished for us. We saw
that we did not love each other any longer."

She stood before Mrs. Talcott in the path, her hands hanging at her
sides, her eyes fixed on the wall above Mrs. Talcott's head.

Mrs. Talcott did not rise. She sat silent, looking up at Karen, and so
for some moments they said nothing, while in the spring sunshine about
them the birds whistled and an early white butterfly dipped and
fluttered by.

"I feel mighty tired, Karen," Mrs. Talcott then said. Her eyelid with
the white mole twitched over her eye, the lines of her large, firm old
mouth were relaxed. Karen's eyes went to her and pity filled her.

"It is my miserable story," she said. "I am so sorry."

"Yes, I f