“Who to?” she asked.  “If it’s some corner loafer, Edie—­” Edith had gained new courage and new facility.  Anything was right that drove the tortured look from her mother’s eyes.

“You can ask him when he comes home this evening.”

“Edie!  Not Willy?”

“You’ve guessed it,” said Edith, and burying her face in the bed clothing, said a little prayer, to be forgiven for the lie and for all that she had done, to be more worthy thereafter, and in the end to earn the love of the man who was like God to her.

There are lies and lies.  Now and then the Great Recorder must put one on the credit side of the balance, one that has saved intolerable suffering, or has made well and happy a sick soul.

Mrs. Boyd lay back and closed her eyes.

“I haven’t been so tickled since the day you were born,” she said.

She put out a thin hand and laid it on the girl’s bowed head.  When Edith moved, a little later, her mother was asleep, with a new look of peace on her face.

It was necessary before Ellen saw her mother to tell her what she had done.  She shrank from doing it.  It was one thing for Willy to have done it, to have told her the plan, but Edith was secretly afraid of Ellen.  And Ellen’s reception of the news justified her fears.

“And you’d take him that way!” she said, scornfully.  “You’d hide behind him, besides spoiling his life for him!  It sounds like him to offer, and it’s like you to accept.”

“It’s to save mother,” said Edith, meekly.

“It’s to save yourself.  You can’t fool me.  And if you think I’m going to sit by and let him do it, you can think again.”

“It’s as good as done,” Edith flashed.  “I’ve told mother.”

“That you’re going to be, or that you are?”

“That we are married.”

“All right,” Ellen said triumphantly.  “She’s quiet and peaceful now, isn’t she?  You don’t have to get married now, do you?  You take my advice, and let it go at that.”

It was then that Edith realized what she had done.  He would still marry her, of course, but behind all his anxiety to save her had been the real actuating motive of his desire to relieve her mother’s mind.  That was done now.  Then, could she let him sacrifice himself for her?

She could.  She could and she would.  She set her small mouth firmly, and confronted the future; she saw herself, without his strength to support her, going down and down.  She remembered those drabs of the street on whom she had turned such cynical eyes in her virtuous youth, and she saw herself one of that lost sisterhood, sodden, hectic, hopeless.

When Willy Cameron left the pharmacy that day it was almost noon.  He went to the house of mourning first, and found Mr. Davis in a chair in a closed room, a tired little man in a new black necktie around a not over-clean collar, his occupation of years gone, confronting a new and terrible leisure that he did not know how to use.