she won't want to eat,
either," mused Emmy, wretchedly, "for that nasty medicine has made her
awful sick. She's got a fever now; that will burn away her strength. And
if it comes to a choice between letting my mother starve and giving up
Bert, I shall have to give him up!"

Emmy sprang out of her chair. The thought was like a lash on a raw
wound.

She ran to the window; it seemed to her that she couldn't breathe; and
her mother's whimpering irritated her past patience. She knew if she
spoke that she would let the bars down for her anger, and if she were
angry her mother would be upset physically, and grow so much worse that
she would feel like a murderer. She felt the goading of that furious
petulance which torments a woman often into sacrificing herself out of
very anger. It was on her tongue to say, "I'd rather die myself than
give up Bert, and you know it; and I'll never forgive you as long as I
live, but rather than see you die before my eyes I _will_ give him up."

Neither to Emmy nor to her mother was there a doubt that any word passed
would be kept. Mrs. Darter, in the lost days of peace, before her
vagaries had corroded her affection, had said once, "Emmy never told me
a lie in her life, nor she never broke a promise she made me!"

Emmy shut her lips tight and looked out of the window. Her troubled gaze
did not note the dewy freshness of the morning on turf and tree. The
houses were brown cottages for the most part, built in the lean period
of western rural architecture when a stunted cruciform effect and a
bescrolled piazza was the model for every village. But the ugly lines of
wood were veiled by a kindly wealth of wistarias and clematis royally
flaunting, by Virginia-creeper and trumpet-vines splashed with vermilion
and yellow; the grass was velvet, there was a gay company of geraniums
prospering in every garden; and below the hills and the tree-tops lay
the lovely, dimpled hill-sides, golden with wheat or shorn to a
varnished silver like nothing so much as the hue of shining flax, and
the waving fields of corn--all under a vault of burning blue, delicate,
tender, innocent, with no sumptuous and threatening richness of cloud
betokening storm, only high in the heavens the milky white cumuli, the
"harvest clouds."

There were a thousand witcheries of light and shade, there was a radiant
lavishness of color; it was a landscape like a multitude all over the
Middle West, nevertheless a sight to make the hear