"Die in my girl's heart! Good God! Ledyard, you ought to see her after the one night! It wrings my heart. It isn't as if the slander had killed her love for him. It hasn't; it has strengthened it. 'I must bear this for him and for me,' she said, looking at me with her mother's eyes. She never looked like her mother before. It's broken me up. What's the world coming to, when women get the bit in their teeth?"
"There are times when all women look alike," Ledyard spoke half to himself; "I've noticed that." The rest of Moffatt's sentence he ignored.
"Why, in the name of all that is good," Moffatt blazed away, "did you send that redheaded girl into our lives? I might have known from the hour she set her will against mine that she was no good omen. Things I haven't crushed, Ledyard, have always ended by giving me a blow, sooner or later. Think of her coming into my home last night and daring——" The words ended in a gulp. "Let me send Margaret to you," pleaded the father at his wits' end. "Huntter is away. Will not be back until to-morrow. Perhaps you can move her. You brought her into the world; you ought to try and keep her here."
At four Margaret entered Ledyard's office. She was very white, very self-possessed, but gently smiling.
"Dear old friend," she said, drawing near him and taking the rôle of comforter at once. "Do not think I blame you. I know you did your best with your blessed, nigh-to glasses on, but we younger folks have long vision, you know. Do you remember how you once told me to swallow your pills without biting them? I obeyed you for a long, long time; but I've bitten this one! It's bitter, but it is for the best. The medicine is in the pills; we might as well know."
"See here, Margaret, I'm not going to use your father's weapons. I only ask you—to wait! Do not break your engagement; let me see Huntter. Do not speak to him of this. I can explain, and—" he paused—"if the worse comes to the worst, the wedding can be postponed; then things can happen gradually."
"No," Margaret shook her head. "This is his affair and mine, and our love lies between us. I want—oh! I want to make him feel as I do, if I can; but above all else he must know that whatever I do is done in love. You see, I cannot hate him now; by and by it would be different if we were not just to each other."
"My poor girl! Do you women think you are going to be happier, the world better, because of—things like this? Men have thought it out!"
"Alone, yes. And women have let you bear the burden—alone. Happiness is—not all. And who can tell what the world will be when we all do the work God sent us to do? I know this: we cannot push our responsibilities off on any one else without stumbling across them sooner or later, for the overburdened ones cannot carry too much, or forever!"
Ledyard expected Travers for dinner, but, as the time drew near, he felt that his young partner would not come. At six a note was handed to him: