“But who is your authority for saying that Macmillan was implicated with this lady?” asked Mr. Thorstad, angrily.

He had not told that Macmillan was his son-in-law and the editor wondered at his defense of Macmillan.

“My dear fellow,” he said with that touch of apologetic and righteous concern with which he always met such attacks. “My dear fellow, your wife told me that.”

CHAPTER XXII
THE MOURNERS

MARGARET came, calm and yet clearly distressed beyond measure. It was pathetic to see her control, to see that she could not even break through it to the relief of abandonment. She was very white during the day of the funeral and the ones succeeding it and her eyes met other eyes somewhat reluctantly. She came on Friday morning and Helen had not been able to persuade her to stay with them. She had gone to a hotel and from there, quite simply to the parlors of the undertakers.

“Don’t wait for me, Helen—and I’d sooner be alone. I’ll be here a long while, probably.”

Perhaps after all Walter and Margaret found relief in each other when the grim parlor door was shut. At least at the funeral Margaret sat very quietly, though the well-bred curious eyes of the little group of people strayed unceasingly toward her. She went through it as she went through the following days. It was soon known, before the will was probated, that she was Walter’s legatee. There was a great deal of business to be done. Walter had decided no doubt that the brief embarrassment of inheriting his fortune was better than the recurrent fear of cramping poverty which had always pursued her and of which she had told him. She saw the lawyers and his business associates and discussed with them the best way of disposing of Walter’s interests, and word of her coldness spread around rather quickly and was considered to justify Mr. Robinson’s deductions.

Gage saw her at the funeral. He had not looked for her—had not felt ready to see her. But in the semicircle of chairs facing the gray satin coffin, he was so placed that his eyes met hers unexpectedly. When they did, hostility glinted in his. “You got him,” they seemed to say—and hers looked back steady, unrepentant, even though her mouth was drawn with pain and sorrow.

It had hit Gage as it had Helen. The lightning had been drawn from him. Walter’s death had roused in him an instinct of resistance which had been dormant. He had no certain idea of what had passed between Walter and Margaret but he knew what Carpenter’s point of view had been—how far he had gone, how willing he had been to yield every concession to a woman—to Margaret—in the belief that it would then be possible to build love on a basis of comradeship. Walter had found failure, just how or why no one knew except perhaps Margaret herself. Gage’s mind stumbled along nervously, trying to analyze his and Walter’s failure. He remembered how they had talked together about women, how Walter had said he would be “willing to trust to their terms.” For some reason he lay dead of their terms. And he himself—he had looked at himself in the glass an hour ago with a kind of horror as if he saw himself for the first time in weeks. There was a softening of his features it seemed to him, a look of dissipation, of untrimmed thought, brooding. The memory of his face haunted him. That was what came of being unwilling to trust to the terms of women. Either way—

He looked across at Margaret again, quiet, firm, persistent through tragedy, through all emotional upheaval, and a grim admiration shot through his hostility. After all she was consistent. With all his admiration for women, even at the height of his passion for Helen, he had never connected her or any woman with ability to follow a line of action with such consistency. He had some sense of what was going on in Margaret’s mind—an apperception of her refusal to let this tragedy break her down.