ent to church,
not, I fancy, because she had any need of religion, but because it was a
place she could go without embarrassment or comment."

There was a moment of silence as though Fawcett was pondering how to
continue, and I heard the blur of voices from the hall and prayed that
nobody would come.

"We lived across the street from them in those days," he resumed, "and I
was a young cub from the medical school, home only at vacations. I
really don't know all that happened. Indeed, it seems to me that I have
known the Draingers only by flashes at any time. They were always
wrapped in mysterious human differences, and even when you saw her on
the street some of that surcharged atmosphere of silence seemed to color
Emily's face. She had grown up then. Her clothes were quite orthodox,
and she was handsome as a leopard is handsome, but always she struck me
as haunted by a vague fear, a fear of the house, perhaps, and of her
mother's power to rule her. I used to fancy, watching her return to
their sombre dwelling, that she was drawn back as to a spider's web by
the fascination of its tragic silences. The story of her life is like a
strange book read by lightning, with many leaves turned over unseen
between the flashes."

"You were in love with her!" I cried.

"No," he said slowly. "I might have been, but I wasn't. You are right,
though, in guessing there was love in her story, only it was not I, it
was Charlie Brede who, so to speak, sprang the trap.

"She got to know him at church. Charles was an honest, ordinary, likable
boy with a face like a Greek god and a streak of the most unaccountable
perversity. His obstinacy was at once intense and wild. That made him
interesting and, though there was no greatness behind it, any woman
would have loved his face. Don't imagine, furthermore, because I have
supposed they met at church, that he was narrowly pious. Everybody went
to church in those days--there was nowhere else to go. Charlie was, in
short, an ordinary, well-behaved youngster, except that his face hinted
at possibilities he couldn't have fulfilled, and except for his dash of
narrow rebellion. I don't see how, to such a stormy creature as Emily,
he could have been bearable.

"The affair had got well along when I came home in the spring. At first,
I gathered from the talk, Emily had met him only away from the house
(it was not home), at church or downtown, or in such ways as she could
unsuspiciously contrive. Then