“It was so long ago,” he temporized.  “Think of it, Elizabeth.  A boy of twenty-one or so.”

“Then there was?”

“I believe so, at one time.  But I know positively that he hadn’t seen or heard from her in ten years.”

“What sort of woman?”

“I wouldn’t think about it, honey.  It’s all so long ago.”

“Did she live in Wyoming?”

“She was an actress,” he said, hard driven by her persistence.

“Do you know her name?”

“Only her stage name, honey.”

“But you know she was an actress!”

He sighed.

“All right, dear,” he said.  “I’ll tell you all I know.  She was an actress, and she married another man.  That’s all there is to it.  She’s not young now.  She must be thirty now—­if she’s living,” he added, as an afterthought.

It was some time before she spoke again.

“I suppose she was beautiful,” she said slowly.

“I don’t know.  Most of them aren’t, off the stage.  Anyhow, what does it matter now?”

“Only that I know he has gone back to her.  And you know it too.”

He heard her going quietly out of the room.

Long after, he closed the house and went cautiously upstairs.  She was waiting for him in the doorway of her room, in her nightgown.

“I know it all now,” she said steadily.  “It was because of her he shot the other man, wasn’t it?”

She saw her answer in his startled face, and closed her door quickly.  He stood outside, and then he tapped lightly.

“Let me in, honey,” he said.  “I want to finish it.  You’ve got a wrong idea about it.”

When she did not answer he tried the door, but it was locked.  He turned and went downstairs again...

When he came home the next afternoon Margaret met him in the hall.

“She knows it, Walter.”

“Knows what?”

“Knows he was back here and didn’t see her.  Annie blurted it out; she’d got it from the Oglethorpe’s laundress.  Mr. Oglethorpe saw him on the street.”

It took him some time to drag a coherent story from her.  Annie had told Elizabeth in her room, and then had told Margaret.  She had gone to Elizabeth at once, to see what she could do, but Elizabeth had been in her closet, digging among her clothes.  She had got out her best frock and put it on, while her mother sat on the bed not even daring to broach the matter in her mind, and had gone out.  There was a sort of cold determination in her that frightened Margaret.  She had laughed a good bit, for one thing.

“She’s terribly proud,” she finished.  “She’ll do something reckless, I’m sure.  It wouldn’t surprise me to see her come back engaged to Wallie Sayre.  I think that’s where she went.”

But apparently she had not, or if she had she said nothing about it.  From that time on they saw a change in her; she was as loving as ever, but she affected a sort of painful brightness that was a little hard.  As though she had clad herself in armor against further suffering.