The second cloud lay in the fact that, without consulting her, he had borrowed money from Rodney Parker.  This stung Martie’s pride bitterly.

“Wallace, why did you?” she asked with difficult self-control.

“Oh, well; it was only a hundred; and he’s coining money,” Wallace answered easily.  “I breezed into the Bank one day, and he was boasting about his job, and his automobile.  He took out his bank book and showed me his balance.  And all of a sudden it occurred to me I might make a touch.  I told him about Dawson.”  He looked at his wife’s dark, resentful face.  “Don’t you worry, Mart,” he said.  “You didn’t borrow it!”

Martie silently resuming her packing reflected upon the irony of life.  She was married, she was going to New York.  What a triumphant achievement of her dream of a year ago!  And yet her heart was so heavy that she might almost have envied that old, idle Martie, wandering under the trees of Main Street and planning so hopefully for the future.

On the day before she left, exhilarated with the confusion, the new hat she had just bought, the packed trunks, she went to see her mother.  It was a strange hour that she spent in the old sitting room, in the cool, stale, home odours, with the home pictures, the jointed gas brackets under which she had played solitaire and the square piano where she had sung “The Two Grenadiers.”  Outside, in the sunken garden, summer burgeoned fragrantly; the drawn window shades bellied softly to and fro, letting in wheeling spokes of light, shutting down the twilight again.  Lydia and her mother, like gentle ghosts, listened to her, reproving and unsympathetic.

“Pa is angry with you, Martie, arid who can blame him?” said Lydia.  “I’m sure I never heard of such actions, coming from a girl who had loving parents and a good home!”

This was the mother’s note.  Lydia was always an echo.

“It isn’t as if you hadn’t had everything, Mart.  You girls had everything you needed—­that party at Thanksgiving and all!  And you’ve no idea of the talk in town!  Pa feels it terribly.  To think that other girls, even like Rose, who had no father, should have so much more sense than our girls.”

Martie talked of Sally’s baby.  “Named for you, Ma,” she told her mother.  And with sudden earnestness she added:  “Why don’t you go see it some day?  It’s the dearest baby I ever saw!”

Mrs. Monroe, who had a folded handkerchief in her bony, discoloured fingers, now pressed it to her eyes, shaking her head as she did so.  Lydia gave Martie a resentful look, and her mother a sympathetic one, before she said primly: 

“If Sally Monroe wanted Ma and me to go see her and her baby, why didn’t she marry some man Pa could have been proud of, and have a church wedding and act in a way becoming to her family?”

To this Martie had nothing to say.  She left messages of love for Len and for her father.  Her mother and sister came with her for good-byes to the old porch with its peeling dark paint and woody rose-vines.