to them, to tell them she was there--the mopish Katy, who made her home
so like a funeral to her husband.

But her limbs refused to move, and she sank back powerless in her chair,
compelled to listen to things which no true husband should ever say to a
mother of his wife, especially when that wife's error consisted
principally in mourning too much for the child "which but for her
imprudence might have been living then." These were Wilford's very
words, and though Katy had once expected him to say them, they came upon
her now with a dreadful shock, making her view herself as the murderer
of her child, and thus blunting the pain she might otherwise have felt
as he went on to speak of Silverton and its inhabitants, just as he
would not have spoken had he known she was so near. Then, encouraged by
his mother, he talked again of her, not against her, but in a way which
made her poor aching heart throb as she whispered, sadly: "He is
disappointed in me. I do not come up to all that he expected. I do very
well, considering my low origin, but I am not what his wife should be."

Wilford had not said all this, but Katy inferred it, and every nerve
quivered with anguish as the wild wish came over her that she had died
on that day when she sat in the summer grass at home watching the
shadows come and go and waiting for Wilford Cameron. Poor Katy! she
thought her cup of sorrow full, when, alas! only a drop had as yet been
poured into it. But it was filling fast, and Mrs. Cameron's words: "It
might have been better with Genevra," was the first outpouring of the
overwhelming torrent which for a moment bore her life and sense away.
She thought they meant her baby--the little Genevra sleeping under the
snow in Silverton--and her white lips answered: "Yes, it would be
better," before Wilford's voice was heard, saying, as he always said:
"No, I have never wished Genevra in Katy's place, though I have
sometimes wondered what the result would have been had I learned
in season how much I wronged her."

Was heaven and earth coming together, or what made Katy's brain so dizzy
and the room so dark, as, with head bent forward and lips apart, she
strained her ear to catch every word of the conversation which followed,
and in which she saw glimpses of that leaf offered her once to read, and
from which she had promised not to shrink should it ever be thrust upon
her? But she did shrink, oh! so shudderingly, holding up her hands and
striking them