upstairs, for I'm tired and all-fired disgusted, but remember, what I
can't hold, no other man is going to get, not even for a little time
while he hangs about. Folks are going to see just what is going on,
believe me! I'm going to leave all the doors and windows open. I'm
going to give you your head, but I'll keep hold of the reins."

And then, because it was all so hideously wrong and twisted and
comical, Mary-Clare laughed! She laughed noiselessly, until the tears
dimmed her eyes. Larry watched her uneasily.

"Oh, Larry," she managed her voice at last, "I never knew that
anything so dreadfully wrong could be made of nothing. You've created
a terrible something, and I wonder if you know it?"

"That's enough!" Larry strode toward the stairway. "Your husband's no
fool, my girl, and the cheap, little, old tricks are plain enough to
him."

Mary-Clare watched her husband pass from view; heard him tramp heavily
in the room above. She sat by the dead fire and thought of him as she
first knew him--knew him? Then her eyes widened. She had never known
him; she had taken him as she had taken all that her doctor had left
to her, and she had failed; failed because she had not thought her
woman's thought until it was too late.

After all her high aims and earnest endeavour to meet this critical
moment in her life Mary-Clare acknowledged, as she sat by the
ash-strewn hearth, that it had degenerated into a cheap and almost
comic farce. To her narrow vision her problem seemed never to have
been confronted before; her world of the Forest would have no sympathy
for it, or her; Larry had reduced it to the ugliest aspect, and by so
doing had turned her thoughts where they might never have turned and
upon the stranger who might always have remained a stranger.

Alone in the deadly quiet room, the girl of Mary-Clare passed from
sight and the woman was supreme; a little hard, in order to combat the
future: quickened to a futile sense of injustice, but young enough,
even at that moment, to demand of life something vital; something
better than the cruel thing that might evolve unless she bore herself
courageously.

Unconsciously she was planning her course. She would go her way with
her old smile, her old outward bearing. A promise was a promise--she
would never forget that, and as far as she could pay with that which
was hers to give, she would pay, but outside of that she would not let
life cheat her.

Bending toward the dead fir