answer at once.

"I--I have to go out again, mother," she said.

Hannah accepted the answer as she had accepted every other negative in
life, great and small.

"Well, I guessed you would."

Janet made a step toward her.

"Mother!" she said, but Hannah gazed at her uncomprehendingly. Janet
stooped convulsively, and kissed her. Straightening up, she stood
looking down at her mother for a few moments, and went out of the room,
pausing in the dining-room, to listen, but Hannah apparently had not
stirred. She took the box of matches from its accustomed place on the
shelf beside the clock, entered the dark bedroom in the front of the
flat, closing the door softly behind her. The ghostly blue light from a
distant arc came slanting in at the window, glinting on the brass knobs
of the chest of drawers-another Bumpus heirloom. She remembered that
chest from early childhood; it was one of the few pieces that, following
them in all their changes of residence, had been faithful to the end:
she knew everything in it, and the place for everything. Drawing a match
from the box, she was about to turn on the gas--but the light from the
arc would suffice. As she made her way around the walnut bed she had a
premonition of poignant anguish as yet unrealized, of anguish being held
at bay by a stronger, fiercer, more imperative emotion now demanding
expression, refusing at last to be denied. She opened the top drawer of
the chest, the drawer in which Hannah, breaking tradition, had put the
Bumpus genealogy. Edward had never kept it there. Would the other things
be in place? Groping with her hands in the left-hand corner, her fingers
clasped exultantly something heavy, something wrapped carefully in
layers of flannel. She had feared her father might have taken it to the
mill! She drew it out, unwound the flannel, and held to the light an
old-fashioned revolver, the grease glistening along its barrel. She
remembered, too, that the cartridges had lain beside it, and thrusting
her hand once more into the drawer found the box, extracting several,
and replacing the rest, closed the drawer, and crept through the
dining-room to her bedroom, where she lit the gas in order to examine
the weapon--finally contriving, more by accident than skill, to break
it. The cartridges, of course, fitted into the empty cylinder. But
before inserting them she closed the pistol once more, cocked it, and
held it out. Her arm trembled violently as she pulled the tri