ne
message?"

"Yes, sir. I gave it to her myself."

It occurred confusedly to Amherst that a well-bred man--as Lynbrook
understood the phrase--would, at this point, have made some tardy feint
of being in his wife's confidence, of having, on second thoughts, no
reason to be surprised at her departure. It was humiliating, he
supposed, to be thus laying bare his discomfiture to his dependents--he
could see that even Knowles was affected by the manifest impropriety of
the situation--but no pretext presented itself to his mind, and after
another interval of silence he turned slowly toward the door of the
smoking-room.

"My letters are here, I suppose?" he paused on the threshold to enquire;
and on the butler's answering in the affirmative, he said to himself,
with a last effort to suspend his judgment: "She has left a line--there
will be some explanation----"

But there was nothing--neither word nor message; nothing but the
reverberating retort of her departure in the face of his return--her
flight to Blanche Carbury as the final answer to his final appeal.

XXIII

JUSTINE was coming back to Lynbrook. She had been, after all, unable to
stay out the ten days of her visit: the undefinable sense of being
needed, so often the determining motive of her actions, drew her back to
Long Island at the end of the week. She had received no word from
Amherst or Bessy; only Cicely had told her, in a big round hand, that
mother had been away three days, and that it had been very lonely, and
that the housekeeper's cat had kittens, and she was to have one; and
were kittens christened, or how did they get their names?--because she
wanted to call hers Justine; and she had found in her book a bird like
the one father had shown them in the swamp; and they were not alone now,
because the Telfers were there, and they had all been out sleighing;
but it would be much nicer when Justine came back....

It was as difficult to extract any sequence of facts from Cicely's
letter as from an early chronicle. She made no reference to Amherst's
return, which was odd, since she was fond of her step-father, yet not
significant, since the fact of his arrival might have been crowded out
by the birth of the kittens, or some incident equally prominent in her
perspectiveless grouping of events; nor did she name the date of her
mother's departure, so that Justine could not guess whether it had been
contingent on Amherst's return, or wholly unconnecte