as
to a refuge from herself. Perhaps in her own mind it stood also for a
sort of penance for sins with which she stood self-charged.

Her marriage with Morgan had been set for June, and somehow it seemed to
her that when the ceremony had been gone through with her besetting
doubts and struggles would end, if not in happiness, at least in
resignation. Then she would acknowledge the abdication of Romance and
accept her allegiance to Duty.

But meanwhile, until the solemn seal of the Church's ritual had been set
upon that resolve, bringing, as she sought to convince herself it would,
a steadied feeling of solace and of perplexities resolved, she seemed to
hang like a Mahomet's coffin in suspended disquiet and misery.

Boone had said he would never explain--and she accepted his assertion as
final. But for that explanation which she had once silenced, and which,
when she was receptive, he had refused, she now burned with anxiety.
Unless she had work to do while she fought back the insurgency and
revolt of her heart, she would not be able to endure the pictures with
which her imagination filled the future. Through this period of
heartache she missed the essential, in that she did not discern the
artificiality of the whole situation or the cure that would have lain in
a repudiation of false pride.

Whatever mistakes she had made, she was now bound by her promise to
Morgan, and doubly bound by the tyranny of her mother's dependence
which, having been once accepted, could no longer be repudiated.

Colonel Wallifarro, bending over his desk one forenoon some two months
after he had given the dinner to announce his son's engagement, had
chokingly fallen forward with his face on his elbows.

When the physicians arrived, he was lying on his office lounge under the
age-yellowed engraving of President Jefferson Davis and the grouped
cabinet of the erstwhile Confederate States of America, and it was there
that he died within the half hour.

"Acute indigestion," said the doctors, "His blood pressure was high and
he refused to ease up on the work. He had often been warned that this
might occur."

His will showed that in one respect at least he had heeded the warning,
for its date was recent. The estate, much shrunken below the estimate of
public supposition, was devised entirely to his son except for a bequest
of a few thousand dollars to Anne's mother. There was mention, too, of a
note, as yet unpaid, for twenty thousand dollars