Bessie cried, flinging her hands outward
dramatically. "Isn't that what I'm saying? You knew something. You knew
it and you let us go ahead. You not only let us go ahead, but you led us
on. You could see already that Archie was spinning his web like a
spider, and that he'd catch us as flies. Now didn't you? Tell the truth,
Ena. Wasn't it in your mind from the first? Long before it was in his?
I'll say that for Archie, that I don't suppose he really _meant_ to ruin
us, while you knew he _would_. That's the difference between a man and
his wife. The man only drifts, but the wife sees years ahead what he's
drifting to. You saw it, Ena--"

When his stepmother bowed her head to sob into her handkerchief Thor
ventured to enter the room. Neither of the women noticed him.

"I must say, Ena," Bessie continued, "that seems to me frightful. I
don't know what you can be made of that you've lived cheerfully through
these last eighteen years when you knew what was coming. If it had been
coming to yourself--well, that might be borne. But to stand by and watch
for it to overtake some one else--some one who'd always been your
friend--some one you liked, for I do believe you've liked me, in your
way and my way--that, I must say, is the limit--_cela passe les bornes_.
Now, doesn't it?"

Mrs. Masterman struggled to speak, but her sobs prevented her.

"In a way it's funny," Bessie continued, philosophically, "how bad a
good woman can be. You're a good woman, Ena, of a kind. That is, you're
good in as far as you're not bad; and I suppose that for a woman that's
a very fair average. But I can tell you that there are sinners whom the
world has scourged to the bone who haven't _begun_ to do what you've
been doing these past eighteen years--who wouldn't have had the nerve
for it. No, Ena," she continued, with another sweeping gesture. "'Pon my
soul, I don't know what you're made of. I almost think I admire you. I
couldn't have done it; I'll be hanged if I could. There are women who've
committed murder and who haven't been as cool as you. They've committed
murder in a frantic fit of passion that went as quick as it came, and
they've swung for it, or done time for it. But they'd never have had the
pluck to sit and smile and wait for this minute as you've waited for
it--when you saw it from such a long way off."

It was the crushed attitude in which his stepmother sank weeping into a
chair that broke the spell by which Thor had been held paral