“I guess I’d better be going,” said Blanche Devine.

The Young Wife raised her head.  Her eyes were round with fright.

“Going!  Oh, please stay!  I’m so afraid.  Suppose she should take sick again!  That awful—­awful breathing—­”

“I’ll stay if you want me to.”

“Oh, please!  I’ll make up your bed and you can rest—­”

“I’m not sleepy.  I’m not much of a hand to sleep anyway.  I’ll sit up here in the hall, where there’s a light.  You get to bed.  I’ll watch and see that everything’s all right.  Have you got something I can read out here—­something kind of lively—­with a love story in it?”

So the night went by.  Snooky slept in her little white bed.  The Very Young Wife half dozed in her bed, so near the little one.  In the hall, her stout figure looming grotesque in wall-shadows, sat Blanche Devine pretending to read.  Now and then she rose and tiptoed into the bedroom with miraculous quiet, and stooped over the little bed and listened and looked—­and tiptoed away again, satisfied.

The Young Husband came home from his business trip next day with tales of snowdrifts and stalled engines.  Blanche Devine breathed a sigh of relief when she saw him from her kitchen window.  She watched the house now with a sort of proprietary eye.  She wondered about Snooky; but she knew better than to ask.  So she waited.  The Young Wife next door had told her husband all about that awful night—­had told him with tears and sobs.  The Very Young Husband had been very, very angry with her—­angry and hurt, he said, and astonished!  Snooky could not have been so sick!  Look at her now!  As well as ever.  And to have called such a woman!  Well, really he did not want to be harsh; but she must understand that she must never speak to the woman again.  Never!

So the next day the Very Young Wife happened to go by with the Young Husband.  Blanche Devine spied them from her sitting-room window, and she made the excuse of looking in her mailbox in order to go to the door.  She stood in the doorway and the Very Young Wife went by on the arm of her husband.  She went by—­rather white-faced—­without a look or a word or a sign!

And then this happened!  There came into Blanche Devine’s face a look that made slits of her eyes, and drew her mouth down into an ugly, narrow line, and that made the muscles of her jaw tense and hard.  It was the ugliest look you can imagine.  Then she smiled—­if having one’s lips curl away from one’s teeth can be called smiling.

Two days later there was great news of the white cottage on the corner.  The curtains were down; the furniture was packed; the rugs were rolled.  The wagons came and backed up to the house and took those things that had made a home for Blanche Devine.  And when we heard that she had bought back her interest in the House With the Closed Shutters, near the freight depot, we sniffed.

“I knew she wouldn’t last!” we said.