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AFTER his altercation with Abner, A. M. Belshue hurried to the old manor, filled with anxiety for his young wife whose sobbing retreat from the well he had seen as he came up the private road toward his home.

Notwithstanding what Abner had said he persisted in an uneasy and a kind of insincere belief that Abner had insulted his wife and this had caused her weeping. He told himself that Abner had spoken to her with the contempt, the crude hill irony, or the cold reserved manner which the hill folk use toward a woman who mothers a child altogether out of love and not out of foresight. Undoubtedly Abner Teeftallow had so used his wife, and that was why she wept. But even while the jeweller repeated this assertion to himself, in the depths of his mind lay a questioning, a repressed doubt, which wrought on his nerves. From this subconscious depth a phrase came to Belshue precisely as if another person had spoken the words inside his ear. The voice said, "She ought to be very grateful for all you've done for her." And with this desolate comment, the voice disappeared again somewhere within the sunless caverns of his being.

The jeweller hurried in through the pauperish magnificence of his piazza into a stately hallway whose tinted stuccoed ceiling had faded and fallen away in places to be renewed by smooth whitewashed plaster; and this in turn had grayed and cracked and fallen. The jeweller's inner voice had been put back where it belonged and he was thinking, "Insulting a woman after his conduct—I ought to have run him off the place with a Winchester. . . ." He would next time.

Belshue passed into a large living room which he had furnished for Nessie, but she was not there. She seemed