Margaret and Mary was fooled by the girl's fine speech.
Yet sometimes late at night when Margaret was coming in from a walk or a
ride with one of her young men, Mary heard a laugh--a high, hysterical
laugh--that disquieted Mary Adams in spite of all Margaret's fair
speaking. But never once did Mary connect in her mind Margaret's wiles
with Grant. Such is the blindness of mothers; such is the deep wisdom of
women!

All the while Grant floundered more hopelessly into the quicksand of
Margaret's enchantment, and when he tried to write to Laura Nesbit,
half-formed shames fluttered and flushed across his mind. So often he
sat alone for long night hours in his attic bedroom in vague agonies and
self accusations, pen in hand, trying to find honest words that would
fill out his tedious letter. Being a boy and being not entirely outside
the gate of his childish paradise, he did not understand the shadow that
was clouding his heart.

But there came one day when the gate closed and looking back, he saw the
angel--the angel with the flaming sword. Then he knew. Then he saw the
face that made the shadow and that day a great trembling came into his
soul, a blackness of unspeakable woe came over him, and he was ashamed
of the light. After that he never wrote to Laura Nesbit.

In May Margaret's school closed, and the Adamses asked her to remain
with them for the summer, and she consented rather listlessly. The busy
days of the June harvest combined with the duties of printing a
newspaper made their Sunday visits with the Nesbits irregular. It was in
July that Mrs. Nesbit asked for Margaret, and Mary Adams remembered that
Margaret, whose listlessness had grown into sullenness, had found some
excuse for being absent whenever the Nesbits came to spend the afternoon
with the Adamses. Then in August, when Amos came home one night, he saw
Margaret hurry from the front porch. He went into the house and heard
Mary and Grant sobbing inside and heard Mary's voice lifted in prayer,
with agony in her voice. It was no prayer for forgiveness nor for mercy,
but for guidance and strength, and he stepped to the bedroom and saw the
two kneeling there with Margaret's shawl over the chair where Mary
knelt. There he heard Mary tell the story of her boy's shame to her God.

Death and partings have come across that threshold during these three
decades. Amos Adams has known anguish and has sat with grief many times,
but nothing ever has cut him to the hear