was a bother.  He never had anybody, you know—­never, never anybody who ...” her voice rose, threatened to break.  She stopped, swallowed hard, and began again:  “The trouble is he has no constitution left—­nothing for a doctor to work with.  It’s not Arnold’s fault.  If he had come out to us, that time in Chicago when he wanted to—­we—­he could—­with Mother to—­” Her steady voice gave way abruptly.  She cast the ravaged, leafless branch violently to the ground and stood looking down at it.  There was not a fleck of color in her beautiful, stony face.

Sylvia concentrated all her will-power on an effort to speak as Judith would have her, quietly, without heroics; but when she broke her silence she found that she had no control of her voice.  She tried to say, “But, Judith dear, if Arnold is like that—­doesn’t he need you more than ever?  You are a nurse.  How can you abandon him now!” But she could produce only a few, broken, inarticulate words in a choking voice before she was obliged to stop short, lest she burst out in the flood of horror which Judith had forbidden.

Broken and inarticulate as they were, Judith knew what was the meaning of those words.  The corners of her mouth twitched uncontrollably.  She bit her marble lower lip repeatedly before she could bring out the few short phrases which fell like clods on a coffin.  “If I—­if we—­Arnold and I are in love with each other.”  She stopped, drew a painful breath, and said again:  “Arnold and I are in love with each other.  Do you know what that means?  He is the only man I could not take care of—­Arnold!  If I should try, we would soon be married, or lovers.  If we were married or lovers, we would soon have—­” She had overestimated her strength.  Even she was not strong enough to go on.

She sat down on the ground, put her long arms around her knees, and buried her face in them.  She was not weeping.  She sat as still as though carved in stone.

Sylvia herself was beyond tears.  She sat looking down at the moist earth on the trowel she held, drying visibly in the hot sun, turning to dust, and falling away in a crumbling, impalpable powder.  It was like seeing a picture of her heart.  She thought of Arnold with an indignant, passionate pity—­how could Judith—?  But she was so close to Judith’s suffering that she felt the dreadful rigidity of her body.  The flat, dead tones of the man in the Pantheon were in her ears.  It seemed to her that Life was an adventure perilous and awful beyond imagination.  There was no force to cope with it, save absolute integrity.  Everything else was a vain and foolish delusion, a two-edged sword which wounded the wielding hand.

She did not move closer to Judith, she did not put out her hand.  Judith would not like that.  She sat quite motionless, looking into black abysses of pain, of responsibilities not met, feeling press upon her the terrifying closeness of all human beings to all other human beings—­there in the sun of June a cold sweat stood on her forehead....