“Mother, darling: I’m running away, to go to David. Please don’t try to stop me or bring me back, for I’ll have to run away again if you do. I’m going to marry David because I love him with all my heart and because he is the only man I could ever marry without causing you shame. He already knows the truth, and it made no difference in his love for me. You know how it was with Grant Proctor. You said yourself that if I told him, he would not want to marry me. And I could never marry a man without first telling him the truth. Arthur Van Horne knew and wanted me to be his mistress. He told me today. He did not think I was good enough to be his wife. It would always be the same. And so I am going to David, who knows and loves me anyway.
“Oh, Mother, forgive me for hurting you like this! But don’t you see that I would hurt you more by staying? After a while you would be ashamed of me because I could not marry. I would humiliate you in the eyes of your friends. And I could not be happy ever, away from David. I wanted to die after Arthur Van Horne told me today what he really wanted of me, but now I know I want to live—with David. Please, Mother, don’t think my love for you—”
She could write no more just then. Laying her hot cheek against the cold glass of the framed photograph of her mother she sobbed so loudly, so heart-brokenly that she did not hear a knock upon the door, did not know her grief was being witnessed until she felt a hand upon her shoulder.
“Sally, darling! What in the world is the matter?” It was Enid Barr’s tender, throaty contralto.
Sally sprang to her feet, her eyes wild with fear, her mother’s picture still tightly clutched in her hands. “I—I was writing you a letter!” she gasped. “I—I—”
“Perhaps I’d better read it now,” Enid said in an odd voice, and reached for the scattered sheets of pale gray notepaper on the desk.
Sally wavered to a chair and slumped into it, too dazed with despair to think coherently. She could not bear to look at her mother, for she knew now how cowardly she had been, how abysmally selfish.
Her flaming face was hidden by her hands when, after what seemed many long minutes, she heard her mother’s voice again:
“Poor Sally! You couldn’t trust me? You’d have run away—like that? Without giving me a chance to prove my love for you?”
Sally dropped her hands and stared stupidly at her mother. Enid was coming toward her, the newspaper with David’s picture in it rustling against the crisp taffeta of her bouffant skirt. And on Enid’s face was an expression of such sorrowful but loving reproach that Sally burst into wild weeping.