again, mother," she said.

Hannah accepted the answer as she had accepted every other negative in
life, great and small.

"Well, I guessed you would."

Janet made a step toward her.

"Mother!" she said, but Hannah gazed at her uncomprehendingly. Janet
stooped convulsively, and kissed her. Straightening up, she stood looking
down at her mother for a few moments, and went out of the room, pausing
in the dining-room, to listen, but Hannah apparently had not stirred. She
took the box of matches from its accustomed place on the shelf beside the
clock, entered the dark bedroom in the front of the flat, closing the
door softly behind her. The ghostly blue light from a distant arc came
slanting in at the window, glinting on the brass knobs of the chest of
drawers-another Bumpus heirloom. She remembered that chest from early
childhood; it was one of the few pieces that, following them in all their
changes of residence, had been faithful to the end: she knew everything
in it, and the place for everything. Drawing a match from the box, she
was about to turn on the gas--but the light from the arc would suffice.
As she made her way around the walnut bed she had a premonition of
poignant anguish as yet unrealized, of anguish being held at bay by a
stronger, fiercer, more imperative emotion now demanding expression,
refusing at last to be denied. She opened the top drawer of the chest,
the drawer in which Hannah, breaking tradition, had put the Bumpus
genealogy. Edward had never kept it there. Would the other things be in
place? Groping with her hands in the left-hand corner, her fingers
clasped exultantly something heavy, something wrapped carefully in layers
of flannel. She had feared her father might have taken it to the mill!
She drew it out, unwound the flannel, and held to the light an
old-fashioned revolver, the grease glistening along its barrel. She
remembered, too, that the cartridges had lain beside it, and thrusting
her hand once more into the drawer found the box, extracting several, and
replacing the rest, closed the drawer, and crept through the dining-room
to her bedroom, where she lit the gas in order to examine the weapon
--finally contriving, more by accident than skill, to break it. The
cartridges, of course, fitted into the empty cylinder. But before
inserting them she closed the pistol once more, cocked it, and held it
out. Her arm trembled violently as she pulled the trigger. Could she do
it? As though to r