“My poor boy, it is worse than I feared,” Mrs. Cameron said, with a little sigh, while Katy, with a great gasping sob, tried to rise and go to them, to tell them she was there—­the mopish Katy, who made her home so like a funeral to her husband.

But her limbs refused to move, and she sank back powerless in her chair, compelled to listen to things which no true husband should ever say to a mother of his wife, especially when that wife’s error consisted principally in mourning too much for the child “which but for her imprudence might have been living then.”  These were Wilford’s very words, and though Katy had once expected him to say them, they came upon her now with a dreadful shock, making her view herself as the murderer of her child, and thus blunting the pain she might otherwise have felt as he went on to speak of Silverton and its inhabitants, just as he would not have spoken had he known she was so near.  Then, encouraged by his mother, he talked again of her, not against her, but in a way which made her poor aching heart throb as she whispered, sadly:  “He is disappointed in me.  I do not come up to all that he expected.  I do very well, considering my low origin, but I am not what his wife should be.”

Wilford had not said all this, but Katy inferred it, and every nerve quivered with anguish as the wild wish came over her that she had died on that day when she sat in the summer grass at home watching the shadows come and go and waiting for Wilford Cameron.  Poor Katy! she thought her cup of sorrow full, when, alas! only a drop had as yet been poured into it.  But it was filling fast, and Mrs. Cameron’s words:  “It might have been better with Genevra,” was the first outpouring of the overwhelming torrent which for a moment bore her life and sense away.  She thought they meant her baby—­the little Genevra sleeping under the snow in Silverton—­and her white lips answered:  “Yes, it would be better,” before Wilford’s voice was heard, saying, as he always said:  “No, I have never wished Genevra in Katy’s place, though I have sometimes wondered what the result would have been had I learned in season how much I wronged her.”

Was heaven and earth coming together, or what made Katy’s brain so dizzy and the room so dark, as, with head bent forward and lips apart, she strained her ear to catch every word of the conversation which followed, and in which she saw glimpses of that leaf offered her once to read, and from which she had promised not to shrink should it ever be thrust upon her?  But she did shrink, oh! so shudderingly, holding up her hands and striking them through the empty air as if she would thrust aside the terrible scepter risen so suddenly before her.  She had heard all that she cared to hear then.  Another word and she should surely die where she was, within hearing of the voices still talking of Genevra.  Stopping her ears to shut out the dreadful sound, she tried to think what she should do.  To gain the door