"Our loves and our poor selves!" Marcia Lowe had often said, and especially when she and Cynthia were working over the little ones of the hill cabins, "what do they matter compared to the sacred lives of these helpless creatures?"
She had been quite fierce about it once when she had told Liza Hope that God would hold her responsible if she brought any more blighted souls into existence through Mason's passion and her own weak yielding.
Lying awake and trembling in the small room off of Olive Treadwell's, Marcia Lowe's words returned with sharp insistence and kept Cynthia wakeful for many an hour.
The next morning she was alone when the maid came to her and said a lady wanted to see her on very important business and had asked that they might be undisturbed for a half hour. Cynthia, puzzled and half afraid, bade the girl bring the caller to the sitting-room in which she then was.
What followed was so vital and impressive that all her life Cynthia was to recall the setting of the scene. The whiteness of the sunlight streaming into the east windows, the deep red of the wall paper, the tick of the marble clock on the shelf, and the crackle of the cannel coal fire on the hearth. While she waited for the visitor she was unconsciously preparing for the part and the lines of what was to follow. By the time the slow, light steps were at the room door, Cynthia seemed to know who the stranger was. The maid closed the door after the guest and then Cynthia said quietly to the tall, black-robed girl:
"You—are—Marian Spaulding!"
"He—he has told you?"
"No. Mrs. Treadwell—told me! Please sit down."
They faced each other with only a few feet between them. Cynthia was obsessed with but one conscious thought—she must go on as she was led; say what she would be told to say. She could not think for herself. But the stranger—distracted and ill at ease, leaped at conclusions; hurried to her goal and took no heed of the obstacles in her path.
"I did not know until last night that he—that Lans had a sister," she said. "Our own affairs were so engrossing and—and exclusive—at that time!"