the reason he would not stop working," said the woman
in a voice which made the physician whirl about. He looked sharply into
her face, and what he saw there took him in one stride to her side. She
kept her stony eyes still on the place where he had been--eyes that saw
only, as though for the first time, some long procession of past events.

"I see everything now," she went on with the same flat intonation. "He
_could_ not stop. That was the reason why he would never rest."

She got slowly to her feet, smoothing over and over one side of her
skirt with a strange automatic gesture. She was looking full into the
doctor's face now. "I have killed him," she said quietly, and fell as
though struck down by a blow from behind.

Her long, long illness was spent in the Melton's home, with the doctor
in attendance and Julia Sandworth, utterly devoted, constantly at hand.
The old Emery house, the outward symbol of her married life, was sold,
and the big "yard" cut up into building lots long before she was able to
sit up. Lydia came frequently, but, acting on the doctor's express
command, never brought Ariadne. The outbreaks of self-reproach and
embittered grief that were likely to burst upon the widow, even in the
midst of one of her quiet, listless days, were not, he said, for a child
to see or hear, especially such a sensitive little thing as Ariadne.
Those wild bursts of remorse were delirious, he told Lydia, but to his
sister he said he wished they were. "I imagine they are the only times
when she comes really to herself," he added sadly.

[Illustration: "I see everything now," she went on. "He could not
stop."]

The especial agony for the sick woman was that nothing of what had
happened seemed to her now in the least necessary. "Why, if I had only
known--if I had only dreamed how things were--" she cried incessantly to
those about her. "What did I care about anything compared with Nat! I
loved my husband! What did I care--if I had only dreamed that--if I had
only known what I was doing!"

Dr. Melton labored in heartsick pity to remove her fixed idea, which
soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge's
death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she
had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and
not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly with
astonished hatred upon a world that had left her so.

"If anyone had warned me--had given me