All these hopes were dashed to the ground by the receipt of a letter from Lucy with a Geneva postmark.  She had not written for months, and Jane broke the seal with a murmur of delight, Martha leaning forward, eager to hear the first word from her bairn.  As she read Jane’s face grew suddenly pale.

“What is it?” Martha asked in a trembling voice.

For some minutes Jane sat staring into space, her hand pressed to her side.  She looked like one who had received a death message.  Then, without a word, she handed the letter to Martha.

The old woman adjusted her glasses, read the missive to the end without comment, and laid it back on Jane’s lap.  The writing covered but part of the page, and announced Lucy’s coming marriage with a Frenchman:  “A man of distinction; some years older than myself, and of ample means.  He fell in love with me at Aix.”

There are certain crises in life with conclusions so evident that no spoken word can add to their clearness.  There is no need of comment; neither is there room for doubt.  The bare facts stand naked.  No sophistry can dull their outlines nor soften the insistence of their high lights; nor can any reasoning explain away the results that will follow.  Both women, without the exchange of a word, knew instantly that the consummation of this marriage meant the loss of Lucy forever.  Now she would never come back, and Archie would be motherless for life.  They foresaw, too, that all their yearning to clasp Lucy once more in their arms would go unsatisfied.  In this marriage she had found a way to slip as easily from out the ties that bound her to Yardley as she would from an old dress.

Martha rose from her chair, read the letter again to the end, and without opening her lips left the room.  Jane kept her seat, her head resting on her hand, the letter once more in her lap.  The revulsion of feeling had paralyzed her judgment, and for a time had benumbed her emotions.  All she saw was Archie’s eyes looking into hers as he waited for an answer to that question he would one day ask and which now she knew she could never give.

Then there rose before her, like some disembodied spirit from a long-covered grave, the spectre of the past.  An icy chill crept over her.  Would Lucy begin this new life with the same deceit with which she had begun the old?  And if she did, would this Frenchman forgive her when he learned the facts?  If he never learned them—­and this was most to be dreaded—­what would Lucy’s misery be all her life if she still kept the secret close?  Then with a pathos all the more intense because of her ignorance of the true situation—­she fighting on alone, unconscious that the man she loved not only knew every pulsation of her aching heart, but would be as willing as herself to guard its secret, she cried: 

“Yes, at any cost she must be saved from this living death!  I know what it is to sit beside the man I love, the man whose arm is ready to sustain me, whose heart is bursting for love of me, and yet be always held apart by a spectre which I dare not face.”