cted Lydia and her mother.

Mrs. Emery's attitude was a revelation to him, a revelation that left
him almost as angrily full of grief as she herself. He had thought best
on the whole not to disclose to her the substance of the several
conversations he had had with his dead friend on the subject of
finances. With two prosperous sons, the widow would be well taken care
of, he thought, perhaps adding with a little acridity, "just as she
always has been, without a thought on her part." But when Mrs. Emery,
divining the truth with an awful intuition, came flying to him after the
settlement, he was not proof against the fury of her interrogations. If
she wanted to know, he would tell her, he thought grimly to himself.

"There is nothing left," she began, bursting into his office, "but the
house, which has a mortgage, and the insurance--nothing! Nothing!"

It was rather soon for her to be resentful, the doctor thought bitterly,
misreading the misery on her face. "No," he said.

"Had the Judge lost any money--do you know?"

"No; I think not."

"But where--what--we had at one time five thousand dollars at least in
the savings bank. I happened to know of that small account. I supposed
of course there was more. There is no trace of even that, the
administrator says."

"That went into the extra expenses of the year Lydia made her debut. And
her wedding cost a great deal, he told me one day--and her
trousseau--and other expenses at that time."

Used as the doctor was to the universal custom of divided interests
among his well-to-do patients, it did not seem too strange to him to be
giving information about her own affairs to this gray-haired matron. She
was not the first widow to whom he had been forced to break bad news of
her husband's business.

Mrs. Emery stared at him, her dry lips apart, a glaze over her eyes. He
thought her expression strange. As she said nothing, he added, with a
little sour pleasure in defending his dead friend, even if it should
give a prick to a survivor, "The Judge was so scrupulously honest, you
know." The widow sat down and laid her arms across the table, still
staring hard at the doctor. It came to him that she was not looking at
him at all, but at some devastating inner sight, which seared her
heart, but from which she could not turn away her eyes. He himself
turned away, beginning to be aware of some passion within her beyond his
divination. There was a long silence.

Finally, "That was