the heart with each clinching
word.

"They say the old woman must have cried out--must have been awakened,
or the man would have taken the money without--"

"Oh don't--oh leave me--" moaned Priscilla.

She did not go downstairs that day. Every time Annalise tried to come
in she sent her away. When she was talked to of food, she felt sick.
Once she began to pace about the room, but the sight of those eager
black knots of people down the street, of policemen and other
important and official-looking persons going in and out of the
cottage, drove her back to her bed and its sheltering, world-deadening
pillow. Indeed the waters of life had gone over her head and swallowed
her up in hopeless blackness. She acknowledged herself wrong. She gave
in utterly. Every word Mrs. Morrison--a dreadful woman, yet dreadful
as she was still a thousand times better than herself--every word she
had said, every one of those bitter words at which she had been so
indignant the morning before, was true, was justified. That day
Priscilla tore the last shreds of self-satisfaction from her soul and
sat staring at it with horrified eyes as at a thing wholly repulsive,
dangerous, blighting. What was to become of her, and of poor Fritzing,
dragged down by her to an equal misery? About one o'clock she heard
Mrs. Morrison's voice below, in altercation apparently with him. At
this time she was crying again; bitter, burning tears; those scorching
tears that follow in the wake of destroyed illusions, that drop, hot
and withering, on to the fragments of what was once the guiding glory
of an ideal. She was brought so low, was so humbled, so uncertain of
herself, that she felt it would bring her peace if she might go down
to Mrs. Morrison and acknowledge all her vileness; tell her how wrong
she had been, ask her forgiveness for her rudeness, beg her for pity,
for help, for counsel. She needed some kind older woman,--oh she
needed some kind older woman to hold out cool hands of wisdom and show
her the way. But then she would have to make a complete confession of
everything she had done, and how would Mrs. Morrison or any other
decent woman look upon her flight from her father's home? Would they
not turn away shuddering from what she now saw was a hideous
selfishness and ingratitude? The altercation going on below rose
rapidly in heat. Just at the end it grew so heated that even through
the pillow Priscilla could hear its flaming conclusion.

"Man, I tell