ain. She coloured with a flush that put two red
spots on her. She did not believe it. She could not and would not. Yet
credence, like the wind, bloweth where it listeth.

Mrs. Austen, noting the spots, knew that the card had been well played
and leisurely selected another.

"Perhaps it is the way you are sitting. Yes, altogether it is quite
ducky. I really must go to Marguerite on Monday. Don't let me forget
about it or the dentist either. I shall have my hands full and my mouth
also. The proper caper, too, apparently. That little dollymop, whom we
saw this afternoon, had her hands full. Did you notice the roll of bills
that she was counting? Such an enjoyable occupation! But it won't last.
You need not worry on that score. He had been paying her off. He assured
me of that and so unnecessarily. Why, I saw the whole thing at a glance.
Anybody but you would have seen it too. But you are so theosophically
nearsighted. It was for that reason I took you away. Now, though, he is
going to begin on a clean slate. Those were his very words, and you, I
suppose, are the clean slate. He has such original expressions, hasn't
he? But there! I forgot. He did not mean me to tell you. In fact, he
begged me not to."

From Margaret's face the flush retreating left it white with that
whiteness which dismay creates. A bucket of mud had drenched her. It did
more, it dazed her. The idea that the bucket was imaginary, the mud
non-existent, that every word she had heard was a lie, did not occur to
this girl who, if a Psyche, was not psychic. In her heart was the mud;
in her mother's hand was the bucket. But the mire itself, he had put
there. The evidence of her own eyes she might have questioned. But he
had admitted it and the fact that he had induced in her the purely
animal feeling to get away, to be alone and to suffer unseen.

She left the room, went to her own, closed the door and at a prie-Dieu
fell on her knees, not to pray--she knew that the Lords of Karma are not
to be propitiated or coerced--but in humiliation.

In humiliation there may be self-pity and that is always degrading. With
uncertain hands she tried to transform that pity into sorrow, not for
herself, but for him. The burnt offering seared her. In the secret
chambers of her being her young soul tripped and fell. For support she
clutched at her creed. Ordinarily it would have sustained her.
Ordinarily it would have told her that her suffering was the penalty for
sufferin