“He’ll fit right in,” Barry said.  “Pack him up and send him along.  If he doesn’t like it, I guess his mother’ll let him come home.”

“Like it!” she echoed.  Then in a lower tone she added, “You don’t know what a load you’re taking off my mind, Barry.”  She paused, colored again, and, to his surprise, continued rapidly, with a quick glance at the door, “Barry, I never did a thing like this before in my life, and I can’t do it now.  You know how much I owe Aunt Ide:  she took me in, and did for me just as she did for Het, when I was a baby; she made my wedding dress, and she came right to me when Gus died, but I can’t let you go back to Santa Paloma not knowing.”

“Not knowing what?” Barry said, close upon the mystery at last.

“You know what Aunt Ide is,” Mrs. Smiley said pleadingly.  “There’s not a mite of harm in her, but she just—­You know she’d been signing Hetty’s checks for a long time, Barry—­” “Go on,” Barry said, as she paused distressedly.

“And she just went on—­” Mrs. Smiley continued simply.

“Went on what?” Barry demanded.

“After Het—­went.  Barry,” the woman interrupted herself, “I oughtn’t be the one to tell you, but don’t you see—­Don’t you see Het’s—­”

“Dead,” Barry heard his own voice say heavily.  The cheap little room seemed to be closing in about him, he gripped the back of the chair by which he was standing.  Mrs. Smiley began to cry quietly.  They stood so for a long time.

After a while he sat down, and she told him about it, with that faithfulness to inessential detail that marks her class.  Barry listened like a man in a dream.  Mrs. Smiley begged him to stay to dinner to see “Aunt Ide,” but he refused, and in the gritty dusk he found himself walking down the street, alone in silence at last.  He took a car to the ocean beach, and far into the night sat on the rocks watching the dark play of the rolling Pacific, and listening to the steady rush and fall of the water.

The next day he saw his wife’s mother, and at the sight of her frightened, fat little face, and the sound of the high voice he knew so well, the last shred of his anger and disgust vanished, and he could only pity her.  He remembered how welcome she had made him to the little cottage in Plumas, those long years ago; how she had laughed at his youthful appreciation of her Sunday fried chicken and cherry pie, and the honest tears she had shed when he went, with the dimpled Hetty beside him, to tell her her daughter was won.  She was Billy’s grandmother, after all, and she had at least seen that Hetty was protected all through her misguided little career from the breath of scandal, and that Hetty’s last days were made comfortable and serene.  He assured her gruffly that it was “all right,” and she presently brightened, and told him through tears that he was a “king,” when it was finally arranged that she should go on drawing the rents of the Mission