The train was ten minutes late, and while she paced the platform at Sawyer Falls, the nearest station, Marcia fidgeted.
She had never seen any of Jason's family. At first a desultory correspondence had taken place between him and his sister, Margaret; then gradually it had died a natural death—the result, no doubt, of his indolence and neglect. When the letters ceased coming, Marcia had let matters take their course.
Was it not kinder to allow the few who still loved him to remain ignorant of what he had become and to remember instead only as the dashing lad who in his teens had left the farm and gone to seek his fortune in the great world?
She had written Margaret a short note after his death and had received a reply expressing such genuine grief it had more than ever convinced her that her course had been the wise and generous one. What troubled her most in the letter had been its outpouring of sympathy for herself. She detested subterfuge and as she read sentence after sentence, which should have meant so much and in reality meant so little, the knowledge that she had not been entirely frank had brought with it an uncomfortable sense of guilt. It was not what she had said but what she had withheld that accused her.
Marcia Howe was no masquerader, and until this moment the hypocrisy she had practiced had demanded no sustained acting. Little by little, moreover, the pricking of her conscience had ceased and, fading into the past, the incident had been forgotten. Miles of distance, years of silence separated her from Jason's relatives and it had been easy to allow the deceit, if deceit it had been, to stand.
But now those barriers were to be broken down and she suddenly realized that to keep up the fraud so artlessly begun was going to be exceedingly difficult. She was not a clever dissembler.
Moreover, any insincerity between herself and Sylvia would strike at the very core of the sincere, earnest companionship she hoped would spring up between them. Even should she be a more skillful fraud than she dared anticipate and succeed in playing her role convincingly, would there not loom ever before her the danger of betrayal from outside sources?
Everyone in the outlying district had known Jason for what he was. There had been no possibility of screening the sordid melodrama from the public. Times without number one fisherman and then another had come bringing the recreant back home across the channel, and had aided in getting him into the house and to bed. His shame had been one of the blots on the upright, self-respecting community.
As a result, her private life had perforce become common property and all its wretchedness and degradation, stripped of concealment, had been spread stark beneath the glare of the sunlight.
It was because the villagers had helped her so loyally to shoulder a burden she never could have borne alone that Marcia felt toward them this abiding affection and gratitude. They might discuss her affairs if they chose; ingenuously build up romances where none existed; they might even gossip about her clothes, her friends, her expenditures. Their chatter did not trouble her. She had tried them out, and in the face of larger issues had found their virtues so admirable that their vices became, by contrast, mere trivialities.