“He was happy with me,” Diane insisted.  “I made him happy.  I wasn’t the best wife he could have had, but he was satisfied with me as I was, in spite of my imperfections.  He was worried sometimes, especially toward—­toward the last; but he wasn’t worried about me, was he, mother dear?”

Still the mother did not speak nor raise her head.  Diane took a step nearer and began again.

“I didn’t know we were living beyond our means.  I didn’t know what was going on around me.  I reproach myself for that.  A wiser woman would have known; but I was young, and foolish, and very, very happy.  I didn’t know I was ruining George, though I’m ready to take all the responsibility for it now.  But he never blamed me, did he, mother? never, by a word, never by a look.  Oh, speak, and tell them!”

Her voice came out with a sharp note of anxiety, in which there was an inflection almost of fear; but when she ceased there was silence.

“Petite mere,” she cried, “aren’t you going to say anything?”

The bowed head remained bowed; the only sign came from the trembling of the extended hand, resting on the top of the stick.

“If you don’t speak,” Diane cried again, “they’ll think it’s because you don’t want to.”

If there was a response to this, it was when the head bent lower.

“Mother,” Diane cried, in alarm, “I’ve no one in the world to speak a word for me but you.  If you don’t do it, they’ll believe I drove George to his death—­they’ll say I was such a woman that he killed himself rather than live with me any longer.”

Suddenly Mrs. Eveleth raised her head and looked round upon them all.  Then she staggered to her feet.

“Take me away!” she said, in a dead voice, to Lucilla van Tromp.  “Help me!  Take me away!  I can’t bear any more!” Leaning on Miss Lucilla’s arm, she advanced a step and paused before Diane, who stood wide-eyed, and awe-struck rather than amazed, at the magnitude of this desertion.  “May God forgive you, Diane,” she said, quietly, passing on again.  “I try to do so; but it’s hard.”

While Derek’s eyes were riveted on Diane, she stood staring vacantly at the empty doorway through which Mrs. Eveleth and Miss Lucilla had passed on their way up-stairs.  This abandonment was so far outside the range of what she had considered possible that there seemed to be no avenues to her intelligence through which the conviction of it could be brought home.  She gazed as though her own vision were at fault, as though her powers of comprehension had failed her.

[Illustration:  DRAWN BY FRANK CRAIG “I’VE NO ONE TO SPEAK A WORD FOR ME BUT YOU”]

Derek, on his part, watched her, with the fascination with which we watch a man performing some strange feat of skill—­from whom first one support, and then another, and then another, falls away, until he is left with nothing to uphold him, perilously, frightfully alone.