t have seen her work as a guilty
thing.

Nor had her work been a guilty thing! No woman watched her child every
moment; at least no woman did so who could have the relief of a nurse.
She might as readily have been paying an afternoon call or playing
bridge when Eric was exposed to scarlet fever. It was just an accident
that she had been writing then instead of doing any one of a dozen
other things of which Ted would have approved. Yes, it was an accident
that she had been writing then, she repeated to herself. But back of
that accident had been her morbid conscience and Ted's
narrow-mindedness; and together they had translated it into a crime.
Thus she had been driven into the compact with God for Eric's life--the
compact that had ruined her own life. Her morbid conscience and Ted's
selfish narrow-mindedness had wrought together for the frustration of
her gift, of her happiness. And it was upon Ted that she put far the
greater share of the blame.

Oddly enough, though she saw her husband so plainly now; though she
censured his faults so unsparingly and regretted so passionately her
own mistakes with him--mistakes of weakness, of cowardly submission,
she told herself--she did not, even now, take the final step of
considering what might have been if she had not married him; of what
might have been if she had married some one altogether more congenial
and unselfish.

It was Charlotte who thought of that for her.

CHAPTER XV

It was toward the end of April that Charlotte arrived in Shadyville.
She had never lived in Shadyville since her first flight from it to
boarding-school. After school had come New York and Paris, where she
had studied singing; and for the last five years she had been on the
concert stage, filling engagements all over the continent--much to the
distress of her family who, though inordinately proud of her, could not
understand why any woman with plenty of money at her disposal should
work. Charlotte had always decided things for herself, however, and
once convinced that her happiness lay in the active pursuit of her art,
no one could dissuade her from it. Certainly no penniless woman could
have worked harder or with more zest than she. Musician to her
finger-tips, and with a remarkably beautiful, silver-clear soprano
voice, she had also the modern woman's desire to earn her living; to
justify her existence by doing something well. An independent and a
busy life was necessary to he