consciousness held back her steps. She
stumbled as she left the bungalow and stopped to catch her breath as if
the oppression of the room in which she had immured her darling had
infected the sunny air of this glorious day and made free breathing an
impossibility. The weights on her feet were so palpable to her that she
unconsciously looked down at them. This was how she came to notice the
dust on her shoes. Alive to the story it told, she burst the spell which
held her and made a bound toward the house.

Rushing to her room she shook her skirts and changed her shoes, and thus
freed from all connecting links with that secret spot, reentered among
her guests, as beautiful and probably as wretched a woman as the world
contained that day.

Yet not as wretched as she could be. There were depths beneath these
depths. If he should ever know! If he should ever come to look at her
with horrified, even alienated eyes! Ah, that were the end--that would
mean the river for her--the river which all were so soon to think had
swallowed the little Gwendolen. Was that Miss Graham coming? Was the
stir she now heard outside, the first indication of the hue and cry
which would soon ring through the whole place and her shrinking heart as
well? No, no, not yet. She could still smile, must smile and smite her
two glove-covered hands together in simulated applause of notes and
tones she did not even hear. And no one noted anything strange in that
smile or in that gracious bringing together of hands, which if any one
had had the impulse to touch--

But no one thought of doing that. A heart may bleed drop by drop to its
death in our full sight without our suspecting it, if the eyes above it
still beam with natural brightness. And hers did that. She had always
been called impassive. God be thanked that no warmth was expected from
her and that no one would suspect the death she was dying, if she did
not cry out. But the moment came when she did cry out. Miss Graham
entered, told her story, and all Mrs. Ocumpaugh's pent-up agony burst
its bounds in a scream which to others seemed but the natural outburst
of an alarmed mother. She fled to the bungalow, because that seemed the
natural thing to do, and never forgetting what was expected of her,
cried aloud in presence of its emptiness: "The river! the river!" and
went stumbling down the bank.

The shoe was near her hand and she drew it out as she went on. When they
found her she had fainted; the