me, they
had been married.

Miriam had been forced to stand by and see it; she had made dainty
garments for Constance's trousseau, and had even been obliged to serve
as maid of honour at the wedding. She had seen, day by day, the man's
love increase and the girl's fancy wane, and, after his blindness came
upon him, Constance would often have been cruelly thoughtless had not
Miriam sternly held her to her own ideal of wifely duty.

Now, when she had taken a mother's place to Barbara, and worked for the
blind man as his wife would never have dreamed of doing, she saw the
faithless one worshipped almost as a household god. The power to
disillusionise North lay in her hands--of that she was very sure. What
if she should come to him some day with the letter Constance had left
for another man and which she had never delivered? What if she should
open it, at his bidding, and read him the burning sentences Constance
had written to another during her last hour on earth? Knowing, beyond
doubt, that Constance was faithless, would he at last turn to the woman
he had deserted for the sake of a pretty face? The question racked
Miriam by night and by day.

[Sidenote: Miriam's Jealousy]

And, as always, the dead Constance, mute, accusing, bitterly
reproachful, haunted her dreams. Her fear of it became an obsession. As
Barbara grew daily more to resemble her mother, Miriam's position became
increasingly difficult and complex.

Sometimes she waited outside the door until she could summon courage to
go in to Barbara, who lay, helpless, in the very room where her mother
had died. Miriam never entered without seeing upon the dressing table
those two envelopes, one addressed to Ambrose North and one to herself.
Her own envelope was bulky, since it contained two letters beside the
short note which might have been read to anybody. These two, with seals
unbroken, were safely put away in Miriam's room.

One was addressed to Laurence Austin. Miriam continually told herself
that it was impossible for her to deliver it--that the person to whom it
was addressed was dead. She tried persistently to forget the five years
that had intervened between Constance's death and his. For five years,
he had lived almost directly across the street and Miriam saw him daily.
Yet she had not given him the letter, though the vision of Constance,
dumbly pleading for some boon, had distressed her almost every night
until Laurence Austin died.

After that, ther