ll," hesitated her mother, "what about
Tom--?"

The eyes of the two women met. "Did father tell you?" asked the
daughter's eyes. The mother's eyes said "Yes." Then rose the Spartan
mother, and put a kind, firm hand upon the daughter's arm and asked:
"But Laura, my dear, my dear, you are not going back again, to all--all
that, are you?"

"I am going home, mother," the daughter replied.

"But your self-respect, child?" quoted the Spartan, and the daughter
made answer simply: "I must go home, mother."

When Laura Van Dorn entered her home she began the evening's routine,
somewhat from habit, and yet many things she did she grimly forced
herself to do. She waited dinner for her husband. She called his office
vainly upon the telephone. She and Lila ate alone; often they had eaten
alone before. And as the evening grew from twilight to dark, she put the
child to bed, left one of the maids in the child's room, lighted an
electric reading lamp in her husband's room, turned on the hall lamp,
instructed the maid to tell the Judge that his wife was with her father
helping him with a wounded man, and then she went out through the open,
hospitable door.

But all that night, as she sat beside the restless man, who writhed in
his pain even under the drug, she went over and over her problem. She
recognized that a kind of finality had come into her relations with her
husband. In the rush of events that had followed his departure, a
period, definite and conclusive seemed to have been put after the whole
of her life's adventures with Tom Van Dorn. She did not cry, nor feel
the want of tears, yet there were moments when she instinctively put her
hands before her face as in a shame. She saw the man in perspective for
the first time clearly. She had not let herself take a candid inventory
of him before. But that night all her subconscious impressions rose and
framed themselves into conscious reflections. And then she knew that his
relation with her from the beginning had been a reflex of his view of
life--of his material idea of the scheme of things.

As the night wore on, she kept her nurse's chart and did the things to
be done for her patient. For the time her emotions were spent. Her heart
was empty. Even for the shattered and suffering body before her, the
tousled red head, the half-closed, pain-bleared eyes, the lips that
shielded the clenched teeth--she felt none of that tenderness that comes
from deep sympathy and moving pity. A