I can
see still the long, solemn face of the Judge as he glanced up at me, and
I see written upon it something of the faint wonder that I had grown to
regard as the peculiar look of the Blands.

I had telephoned Sally not to wait, and when I reached home I found that
she had dismissed the servants and was preparing a little supper for me
herself. While she served me, I sat perfectly silent, too exhausted to
talk or to think, trying in vain to remember the more important events
of the day. Only once did Sally speak, and that was to beg me to eat the
slice of cold turkey she had laid on my plate.

"I'm not hungry, I got something with Judge Kenton down town," I
returned as I pushed back my chair and rose from the table; "what I need
is sleep, sleep, sleep. If I don't get to bed, I'll drop to sleep on the
hearth-rug."

"Then go, dear," she answered, and not until I reached the landing above
did I realise that through it all she had not put a single question to
me. With the realisation I knew that I ought to have told her what in
her heart she must have felt it to be her right to know; but a nervous
shrinking, which seemed to be a result of my complete physical
exhaustion, held me back when I started to retrace my steps.

She might cry, and the sight of tears would unman me. There's time
enough, I thought. Why not to-morrow instead? Yet in my heart I knew it
would be no easier to do it to-morrow than it was to-day. By some
strange freak of the imagination those unshed tears of hers seemed
already dropping upon my nerves. "There's time enough, she'll be obliged
to hear it in the end," something within me repeated with a kind of
dulness. And with the words, while my head touched the pillow, I started
suddenly wide awake as though from the flash of a lantern that was
turned inward. Trivial impressions of the afternoon stood out as if
illuminated against the outer darkness, and there hovered before me the
face of the old woman, in the plaid shawl, with her twisted mouth, and
the foot of her grey yarn stocking held out in her palsied hand. "I
reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back," said a voice somewhere in my
brain.

CHAPTER XXV

WE FACE THE FACTS AND EACH OTHER

The panic which had begun with the depositors of small accounts, spread
next day to the holders of larger ones, and even while I stood at my
window and watched the cash brought in in bags through the cheering
crowd on the sidewalk, I knew that the q