y, clutching her by the arms. "What about me?
Is he down on me? His votes,--his two hundred votes, you know,--they
could defeat me--ruin me! Tell me--tell me--"

"No, no; it's not you he blames; not you, Ross. It's I. He thinks I'm
a fool--the brute! He calls me a fool!"

"Thank God! Thank God!" ejaculated the man, laughing wildly in his
revulsion of relief.

"But I--I am miserable," sobbed the woman, and clung to him when he
would have released her. "You will go to your triumph and your
future,--what have I left now?"

Shelby swayed unsteadily with his burden, his eyes on the perfect
shoulders whose curves played and quivered with the labored breath. He
recalled a fragment of poetry--something about "morbid . . . faultless
shoulder-blades," which he had overheard Bernard Graves quote to Volney
Sprague as Mrs. Hilliard passed at the club. Morbid had seemed an
inept word then, but he began to spy out a certain fitness. The house
was too still by far--dangerously still; the stillness of espionage.
With a flash of intuition he lifted his eyes, and in the doorway met
Joe Hilliard. Almost at the same instant the woman in her trumpery saw
him too.

"Joe!" she called, in an incredulous, husky whisper. "Joe!"

He loomed there in the dusk like a rock, and with a frightened whimper
she tottered and clung to him as she had clung to Shelby.

"I'm not a bad woman, Joe," she babbled. "I'm not a bad woman."

"No one has accused you," replied her husband, putting her gently away.

"Nor am I what you doubtless think," stammered Shelby. "It's all a
mistake, Joe; a big mistake. It can be explained--it can be
explained--"

Hilliard doubled and relaxed a mighty fist.

"No; not under this roof," he said quietly. "Go!"

CHAPTER XII

The scandal derived its impetus from the vulgar circumstance that the
Hilliard washing went to line on Tuesday (Monday having dawned lowering
and ended stormy), thereby exposing more family linen than could
possibly have been foreseen, since the day laundress and Mrs.
Hilliard's housemaid were bound in friendship by a common appetite for
gossip and for tea. Monday's unfinished labors despatched, these
familiars laid their heads together over a pannikin of their favorite
brew, and the laundress, poising her saucer with the elegance which was
the envy of her circle, ventured the opinion that the housemaid was
holding in reserve a palate-tickling morsel concerning the missus;