of the latter, by now half-way to the
house, had nothing to do with any of Sally's shocking vulgarities
and outrageous utterances. No, nor even with the green-eyed monster
Jealousy her unscrupulous effrontery had not hesitated to impute. She
allowed it to dominate her expression, as there was no one there to
see, until the girl overtook her. Then she wrenched her face and her
thoughts apart with a smile. "You _are_ a mad little goose," said she.

But the thing that weighted her mind--oppressed or puzzled her, as
might be--what was it?

Had she been obliged to answer the question off-hand she herself might
have been at a loss to word it, though she knew quite well what it
was. It was the old clash between the cause of Sally and its result.
It was the thought that, but for a memory that every year seemed to
call for a stronger forgetfulness, a more effective oblivion, this
little warm star that had shone upon and thawed a frozen life, this
salve for the wound it sprang from, would have remained unborn--a
nonentity! Yes, she might have had another child--true! But would that
child have been Sally?

She was so engrossed with her husband, and he with her, that she felt
she could, as it were, have trusted him with his own identity. But,
then, how about Sally? Though she might with time show him the need
for concealment, how be sure that nothing should come out in the very
confusion of the springing of the mine? She could trust him with
his identity--yes! Not Sally with hers. Her great surpassing terror
was--do you see?--not the effect on _him_ of learning about Sally's
strange _provenance_, but for Sally herself. The terrible knowledge
she could not grasp the facts without would cast a shadow over her
whole life.

So she thought and turned and looked down on the beach. There below
her was this unsolved mystery sitting in the sun beside the man whose
life it had rent asunder from its mother's twenty years ago. And as
Rosalind looked at her she saw her capture and detain his hat. "To
let his mane dry, I suppose," said Rosalind. "I hope he won't get a
sunstroke." She watched them coming up the shingle, and decided that
they were going on like a couple of school-children. They were,
rather.

* * * * *

Perhaps the image in Sally's profane mind of "hers affectionately,
Rebecca Vereker," before or after an elderly bathe, would not have
appeared there if she had not received that morning a let