worry about."

He made no response, and Madge heard his step pass into his wife's
room. A moment later Miss Wildmere also departed, and her voice was
soon heard on the piazza. The conversation had been carried on in a
comparatively low tone, and some words had been lost, but those heard
made the sense given above. Circumstances had favored Madge. The
open window at which she was sitting was near the next window in Miss
Wildmere's room, and within two or three feet there was the customary
thin-panelled door which enables the proprietor to throw rooms
together, as required, for the accommodation of families. Therefore,
without moving or volition on her part information vital to her
relatives had been brought to her knowledge. She was perfectly
overwhelmed at first, and sat as if stunned, her cheeks scarlet with
shame for the act of listening, even while she felt that for the sake
of the innocent and unsuspecting, to whom she owed loyalty and love,
it was right. Soon, however, came the impulse to seek the refuge of
her own room and think of what must be done. She stepped lightly to
the outer door; there was no sound in the corridor, and with all the
composure she could assume she passed quietly out and gained her own
apartment unobserved.

CHAPTER XXX

THE STRONG MAN UNMANNED

Madge locked her doors, bathed her hot face, then paced her room in
great agitation, feeling that not only her own happiness was in peril,
but Graydon's also. Her mental distress was greatly enhanced by a
feeling that in order to save her relatives she herself had been
guilty of what to her sensitive nature appeared almost like a crime.
"Was it right?" she asked herself again and again, and at last reached
the conclusion that the fealty she owed to her relatives and to the
man she loved justified her course--that she should shield them even
at such cost to herself. "It was not curiosity that kept me passive,"
she thought, "but the hope, the chance to save Henry from financial
ruin and Graydon from far worse disaster." It would indeed be
"horrible" for any true man to marry such a girl; and to permit the
man she loved to make such a fatal blunder was simply monstrous. Yet
how could she prevent it without doing violence to every maidenly
principle of her nature?

Should she tell her sister? This impulse passed almost instantly. Mary
had not the tact, nerve, or reticence to meet such an emergency. It
seemed, however, that if something was