“Who to?” she asked. “If it's some corner loafer, Edie—” Edith had gained new courage and new facility. Anything was right that drove the tortured look from her mother's eyes.
“You can ask him when he comes home this evening.”
“Edie! Not Willy?”
“You've guessed it,” said Edith, and burying her face in the bed clothing, said a little prayer, to be forgiven for the lie and for all that she had done, to be more worthy thereafter, and in the end to earn the love of the man who was like God to her.
There are lies and lies. Now and then the Great Recorder must put one on the credit side of the balance, one that has saved intolerable suffering, or has made well and happy a sick soul.
Mrs. Boyd lay back and closed her eyes.
“I haven't been so tickled since the day you were born,” she said.
She put out a thin hand and laid it on the girl's bowed head. When Edith moved, a little later, her mother was asleep, with a new look of peace on her face.
It was necessary before Ellen saw her mother to tell her what she had done. She shrank from doing it. It was one thing for Willy to have done it, to have told her the plan, but Edith was secretly afraid of Ellen. And Ellen's reception of the news justified her fears.
“And you'd take him that way!” she said, scornfully. “You'd hide behind him, besides spoiling his life for him! It sounds like him to offer, and it's like you to accept.”