She compressed her lips and regarded him with hostility.  Then she shrugged her shoulders.

“I suppose I must make the best of it.  I realize I am powerless.”  She realized it fully in that moment; realized that her son was a man, a man with force and a will, and that it would be hopeless to try to bring him to submit to her influence.  “There is nothing for us to discuss.  I shall ask for what I need. ...”

“Very well,” he said, not coldly, not sharply, but sorrowfully.  There was no need to try to approach nearer to his mother.  She did not desire it.  In her the motherly instinct did not appear.  She had never given birth to a son; what she had done was to provide her husband with an heir, and, that being done, she was finished with the affair. ...

He went from his mother to his own room, where he sat down at his desk and wrote a brief letter to his wife.  It was not so difficult to compose as the other one had been, but it was equally succinct, equally barren of emotion.  Yet he was not barren of emotion as he wrote it.

My dear Ruth [he said],-My father is dead.  This makes a very material change in my financial condition, and the weekly sum I have been sending you becomes inadequate.  Hereafter a suitable check will be mailed you each week until the year expires.  At that time I shall make a settlement upon you which will be perfectly satisfactory.  In the meantime, should you require anything, you have but to notify me, or, if you prefer, notify Mr. Manley Richmond, who will attend to it immediately.

This letter he mailed himself. ...  Not many days later it was returned to him with “Not Found” stamped upon it in red ink.  Bonbright fancied there must be some error, so he sent it again by messenger.  The boy returned to report that the apartment was vacant and that no one could furnish the present address of the lady who had occupied it.  Bonbright sent to Ruth’s mother, who could only inform him that Ruth had gone away, she did not know where, and such goings-on she never saw, and why she should be asked to bear more than she had borne was a mystery..—­

There was but one conclusion for Bonbright.  Ruth had been too impatient to wait for the year to expire and had gone away with Dulac. ...

Hilda could have corrected that belief, but he did not see Hilda, had not seen her, for his new duties and new problems and responsibilities occupied him many more hours a day than any labor union or legislature would have permitted an employee to be required to work.  His hours of labor did not stop with the eighth nor with the tenth. ...  There were days when they began with daylight and continued almost to daylight again.

Ruth had gone with Dulac. ...  She was hidden away.  Not even Hilda Lightener knew where she was, but Hilda knew why she had gone. ...  There is an instinct in most animals and some humans which compels them to hide away when they suffer wounds.  Hilda knew Ruth had crept away because she had suffered the hardest to bear of all wounds—­and crushing of hope. ...