iffly
outstretched, seemed to arrest her attention specially. She caught at
Susan's dress as if she was unaware that she made the movement or of the
sharp shudder which followed it.

"Those--are its things, aren't they, Susan?" she said.

"Yes," Susan answered, her sullen look of pain coming back to her face.

"I--don't know--how people _bear_ it!" exclaimed Margery. It was an
exclamation, and her hand went quickly up to her mouth almost as if to
press it back.

"They don't _bear_ it," said Susan, stonily. "They have to go through
it--that's all. If you was standin' on the gallows with the rope round
your neck and the trap-door under your feet, you wouldn't be bearin' it,
but the trap-door would drop all the same, an' down you'd plunge--into
the blackness."

It was on this morning, on her way through the streets, that Margery
dropped in a dead faint upon the pavement, and Miss Amory Starkweather,
passing in her carriage, picked her up and carried her home.

Susan Chapman never saw her again. Some months afterwards came the rumour
that she had died of consumption in Italy.

CHAPTER XVII

When, in accordance with Baird's instructions, Susan Chapman took the
note to Miss Starkweather, she walked through the tree-shaded streets,
feeling as if she had suddenly found herself in a foreign country. To the
inhabitants of Janway's Mills, certain parts of Willowfield stood for
wealth, luxury, and decorous splendour. The Mills, which lived within
itself, was easily impressed. Its--occasionally resentful--respect for
Willowfield was enormous. It did not behold it as a simple provincial
town, whose business establishments were primitive, and whose frame
houses, even when surrounded by square gardens with flower-beds adorning
them, were merely comfortable middle-class abodes of domesticity. It was
awed by the Willowfield _Times_, it revered the button factory, and
bitterly envied the carriages driven and the occasional festivities held
by the families of the representatives of these monopolies. The carriages
were sober and middle-aged, and so were the parties, but to Janway's
Mills they illustrated wealth and gaiety. People drove about in the
vehicles and wore fine clothes and ate cakes and ice-cream at the
parties--neither of which things had ever been possible or ever would
become possible to Janway's.

And Susan, who had been a Pariah and an outcast at the Mills, was walking
through the best streets, carrying a n