a sense of background which acted as a sort of anchor.

Not that she was without standards or ideals.

Nevertheless, human nature is human nature and it did her no harm to realize she was not an isolated being whose actions were of no concern to anyone in the wide world.

Separated though she was by the confines of her island home, she was not allowed to let her remoteness from Wilton detach her from it, nor absolve her from her share in its obligations. She had her place and every day of the year a score of lookers-on, familiar with her general schedule, checked up on her fulfillment of it.

If, given limited leeway, she did not appear for her mail or for provisions; if she was not at church; if[33] the lights that should have twinkled from her windows were darkened, someone unfailingly put out across the channel to make sure all was well with her. Nay, more, if any emergency befell her, she had only to run up a red lantern on the pole beside her door and aid would come. What wonder then that, in face of such friendliness, Marcia Howe failed to resent the community's grandmotherly solicitude?

[33]

She had never kept secrets from her neighbors—indeed she never had had secrets to keep. Her nature was too crystalline, her love of truth too intense.

If she had followed her usual custom and been open with Jason's sister, the dilemma in which she now found herself would never have arisen. Granted that her motive had been a worthy one had it not been audacious to make of herself a god and withhold from Margaret Hayden facts she had had every right to know, facts that belonged to her? Such burdens were given human beings to bear, not to escape from.

Why should she have taken it upon herself to shield, nay prevent Jason's flesh and blood from participating in the sorrow, shame, disappointment she herself had borne? The experience had had immeasurable influence in her own life. Why should it not have had as much in Margaret's?

Alas, matters of right and wrong, questions of[34] one's responsibility toward others were gigantic, deeply involved problems. What her duty in this particular case had been she did not and would now never know, nor was it of any great moment that she should. Margaret was beyond the reach of this world's harassing enigmas. If with mistaken kindness she had been guided by a pygmy, short-sighted philosophy, it was 

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