While Mrs. Pennybacker was thus effectively wielding the battle-ax that common sense and observation had laid ready at her hand, Margaret, bleeding on the field, was well-nigh ready to give up the fight. An ambushed foe had fallen upon her and borne her down, and before she could recover herself, Courage, who had been through it all her strong support and chiefest counselor, had turned craven and fled.
While this fitly, though inadequately, describes the girl's condition of mind as she sat in the car swiftly traversing the short distance between Elmhurst and Washington, there was nothing in her outward appearance to indicate that it was so.
The occupants in that parlor-car saw in Margaret a well-dressed, quiet-appearing young woman, remarkable for nothing perhaps but the pronounced beauty of her face and her rather queenly carriage. It was a mild surprise to see a woman of this type get on at a way station. As she sat intently looking out of the window at the moving panorama of winter trees seen now to best advantage stripped of their summer garments, one might have thought her a devotee of Nature, with an eye and heart single to that alone.
But the oaks and the elms and the lesser folk of the tree-world were in reality making an impression on a retina as unseeing as though back of it there were no brain. This quiet, self-contained looking lady looking out at the wintry landscape with such apparent appreciation was saying to herself in the abandon of despair, "Is it true? Can it be true?"
A phantom shape had been pursuing Margaret De Jarnette for months—a specter of evil form and visage. It had given her just a glimpse of itself now and then; it was quick to hide behind more agreeable forms and she was always glad to lose it; then she would forget it until some day it would start up before her like a grinning death's head for a brief second and again disappear. She had eluded it. She had denied its existence even to herself, but she knew now that she had feared it from the first and refused to face it. To-day it had taken bodily shape and grappled with her.
It was through Mammy Cely that the incarnation came. Margaret had been talking to the old woman as she often did about the case in court, its long delay, and finally the bill and the relief which that promised even if the case in court failed.
"Miss Margaret," said Mammy Cely, not looking at her, but speaking in a voice of great compassionateness, "is you sho' that bill gwineter he'p you?"
"Why, certainly!" Margaret answered as she had answered Mrs. Pennybacker when she had asked the same foolish question (it was at such times that the specter rose before her), "It will give me Philip."
Mammy Cely still looked away.
"Marse Richard 'low that bill don't have nothin' 't all to do with Philip. Maybe he don't know," she added, but rather doubtfully, for she had boundless confidence in Richard's knowledge.