Grace followed last with Mr. Libby, very heavyhearted and reckless.  She had not only that sore self-accusal; but the degradation of the affair, its grotesqueness, its spiritual squalor, its utter gracelessness, its entire want of dignity, were bitter as death in her proud soul.  It was not in this shameful guise that she had foreseen the good she was to do.  And it had all come through her own wilfulness and self-righteousness.  The tears could mix unseen with the rain that drenched her face, but they blinded her, and half-way up the steps she stumbled on her skirt, and would have fallen, if the young man had not caught her.  After that, from time to time he put his arm about her, and stayed her against the gusts.

Before they reached the top he said, “Miss Breen, I’m awfully sorry for all this.  Mrs. Maynard will be ashamed of what she said.  Confound it!  If Maynard were only here!”

“Why should she be ashamed?” demanded Grace.  “If she had been drowned, I should have murdered her, and I’m responsible if anything happens to her,—­I am to blame.”  She escaped from him, and ran into the house.  He slunk round the piazza to the kitchen door, under the eyes of the ladies watching at the parlor windows.

“I wonder he let the others carry her up,” said Miss Gleason.  “Of course, he will marry her now,—­when she gets her divorce.”  She spoke of Mrs. Maynard, whom her universal toleration not only included in the mercy which the opinions of the other ladies denied her, but round whom her romance cast a halo of pretty possibilities as innocently sentimental as the hopes of a young girl.

IV.

The next morning Grace was sitting beside her patient, with whom she had spent the night.  It was possibly Mrs. Maynard’s spiritual toughness which availed her, for she did not seem much the worse for her adventure:  she had a little fever, and she was slightly hoarser; but she had died none of the deaths that she projected during the watches of the night, and for which she had chastened the spirit of her physician by the repeated assurance that she forgave her everything, and George Maynard everything, and hoped that they would be good to her poor little Bella.  She had the child brought from its crib to her own bed, and moaned over it; but with the return of day and the duties of life she appeared to feel that she had carried her forgiveness far enough, and was again remembering her injuries against Grace, as she lay in her morning gown on the lounge which had been brought in for her from the parlor.

“Yes, Grace, I shall always say if I had died and I may die yet—­that I did not wish to go out with Mr. Libby, and that I went purely to please you.  You forced me to go.  I can’t understand why you did it; for I don’t suppose you wanted to kill us, whatever you did.”

Grace could not lift her head.  She bowed it over the little girl whom she had on her knee, and who was playing with the pin at her throat, in apparent unconsciousness of all that was said.  But she had really followed it, with glimpses of intelligence, as children do, and now at this negative accusal she lifted her hand, and suddenly struck Grace a stinging blow on the cheek.