All this time Ellen and Adelaide had been gradually retreating, the Whitneys following them.  When Mrs. Whitney at last opened wide the casket of her woe and revealed Ross there, too, he wheeled on Adelaide with a protesting, appealing look.  He was confident that he was in the right, that his case was different from Janet’s; confident also that Adelaide would feel that in defending his rights he was also defending hers that were to be.  But before Del there had risen the scene after the reading of her own father’s will.  She recalled her rebellious thoughts, saw again Arthur’s fine face distorted by evil passions, heard again her mother’s terrible, just words:  “Don’t trample on your father’s grave, Arthur Ranger!  I’ll put you both out of the house!  Go to the Whitneys, where you belong!” And then she saw Arthur as he now was, and herself the wife of Dory Hargrave.  And she for the first time realized, as we realize things only when they have become an accepted and unshakable basic part of our lives, what her father had done, what her father was.  Hiram had won his daughter.

“We are going now,” said Ellen, coming from the stupor of shame and horror into which this volcanic disgorging of the secret minds and hearts of the Whitneys had plunged her.  And the expression she fixed first upon Janet, then upon Ross, then upon Matilda, killed any disposition they might have had to try to detain her.  As she and Adelaide went toward her carriage, Ross followed.  Walking beside Adelaide, he began to protest in a low tone and with passionate appeal against the verdict he could not but read in her face.  “It isn’t fair, it isn’t just!” he pleaded.  “Adelaide, hear me!  Don’t misjudge me.  You know what your—­your good opinion means to me.”

She took her mother’s arm, and so drew farther away from him.

“Forgive me,” he begged.  “Janet put me out of my mind.  It drove me mad to have her rob—­us.”

At that “us” Adelaide fixed her gaze on his for an instant.  And what he saw in her eyes silenced him—­silenced him on one subject forever.

He left for Chicago without seeing either his sister or his mother again.  His impulse was to renounce to his mother his share of his father’s estate.  But one does not act hastily upon an impulse to give up nearly a million dollars.  On reflection he decided against such expensive and futile generosity.  If it would gain him Adelaide—­then, yes.  But when it would gain him nothing but the applause of people who in the same circumstances would not have had even the impulse to forego a million—­“Mother’s proper share will give her as much of an income as a woman needs at her age and alone,” reasoned he.  “Besides, she may marry again.  And I must not forget that but for her Janet would never have got that dowry.  She brought this upon herself.  Her folly has cost me dearly enough.  If I go away to live abroad or in New York—­anywhere to be free of the Howlands—­why I’ll need all I’ve got properly to establish myself.”