o when he
wanted to--we--he could--with Mother to--" Her steady voice gave way
abruptly. She cast the ravaged, leafless branch violently to the
ground and stood looking down at it. There was not a fleck of color in
her beautiful, stony face.

Sylvia concentrated all her will-power on an effort to speak as Judith
would have her, quietly, without heroics; but when she broke her
silence she found that she had no control of her voice. She tried to
say, "But, Judith dear, if Arnold is like that--doesn't he need you
more than ever? You are a nurse. How can you abandon him now!" But
she could produce only a few, broken, inarticulate words in a choking
voice before she was obliged to stop short, lest she burst out in the
flood of horror which Judith had forbidden.

Broken and inarticulate as they were, Judith knew what was the meaning
of those words. The corners of her mouth twitched uncontrollably. She
bit her marble lower lip repeatedly before she could bring out the few
short phrases which fell like clods on a coffin. "If I--if we--Arnold
and I are in love with each other." She stopped, drew a painful
breath, and said again: "Arnold and I are in love with each other. Do
you know what that means? He is the only man I could not take care
of--Arnold! If I should try, we would soon be married, or lovers. If
we were married or lovers, we would soon have--" She had overestimated
her strength. Even she was not strong enough to go on.

She sat down on the ground, put her long arms around her knees, and
buried her face in them. She was not weeping. She sat as still as
though carved in stone.

Sylvia herself was beyond tears. She sat looking down at the moist
earth on the trowel she held, drying visibly in the hot sun, turning
to dust, and falling away in a crumbling, impalpable powder. It was
like seeing a picture of her heart. She thought of Arnold with an
indignant, passionate pity--how could Judith--? But she was so close
to Judith's suffering that she felt the dreadful rigidity of her body.
The flat, dead tones of the man in the Pantheon were in her ears. It
seemed to her that Life was an adventure perilous and awful beyond
imagination. There was no force to cope with it, save absolute
integrity. Everything else was a vain and foolish delusion, a
two-edged sword which wounded the wielding hand.

She did not move closer to Judith, she did not put out her hand.
Judith would not like that. She sat quite motionless, looking int