“Julie, just one thing.”  Barbara hesitated.  “Shall you see Jim?”

Julia paused, and their eyes met in the gloom.  Barbara thought she had never seen anything more marked than the tragic intensity of the other woman’s face.  Julia might have been a young priestess, the problems of the world on her shoulders.

“That I can’t say, Bab,” she answered thoughtfully.  And a moment later they reached the cabin, and were welcomed by Richie and the children.

CHAPTER VIII

It was in late September that the mail brought her a note from Jim.  Julia’s heart felt a second of paralyzing cramp as she put her hand on the letter; she read its dozen lines in a haze of dancing light; the letters seemed to swim together.

Jim wrote that he was at home for a few days, and was most anxious to see her, and to have a talk that would be of advantage to them both.  For obvious reasons, her home was not suitable; would she suggest a time and place?  He was always hers faithfully, James Studdiford.

Anna, glowing and delicious, was leaning against Julia’s shoulder as Julia read and reread the little document.  The mother looked down obliquely at the little rose-leaf face, the blue, blue eyes, the fresh, firm, baby mouth.

“When I am a grown-up girl,” Anna said, with her sweet, mysterious smile, “I shall have letters, and I will write answers, and write the envelopes, too!  And I’ll write you letters, Mother, when you go ’way and leave me with Grandma!”

“Will you?” asked Julia, rubbing the child’s soft cheek with her own.

“Every day!” Anna said.  “Who’s writing you with that cunning little owl on the paper, Mother?”

“That’s the Bohemian Club owl,” Julia evaded, giving Anna only one fair look at him before she closed the letter.  She went to her desk, and swiftly, unhesitatingly, wrote her reply.  Jim must excuse her, she could not see the advantage of their meeting, she would much prefer not to see him.  Briskly rubbing her blotter over the flap of the sealed envelope, she had a vision of him, interrupting his evening of talk with old friends to scratch off the note to her, and felt that she detested him.

An unhappy week followed, in which Julia had time to feel that almost any consequences would have been easier to bear than the unassailable wall of silence and misgiving and doubt that hemmed her in.  Constant nervous terrors weakened her spiritually and bodily, and she could not bear to have Anna for one moment out of her sight.  Mrs. Page and Mrs. Torney saw notice in the papers of Jim’s return, and suspected the cause of this new agitation in Julia, but neither dared attempt to force her confidence.