SOME TWO weeks after the staff of Beech Lodge had been completed by the engagement of the gardener, Mrs. Millicent and her daughter were walking along a quiet lane at a little distance from their old home. The house itself they had not seen since the time of the tragedy, and over them still hung the weight of a great grief. It had touched Mrs. Millicent’s hair with gray and given her a strangely wistful expression. Her sorrow was increased by the belief that her husband had had an enemy, the husband who had worshiped her with love and devotion for twenty years of married companionship. What enemy could such a man make in all the world?

S

For Jean, her daughter, the blow had been no less severe. And it had a deeper significance. Dazed and stupefied, she was nevertheless aware of the power behind the blow, the power that dealt it. Where her mother was inclined to give way with a hopeless wonder at the cruelty of fate, Jean perceived that the hand that thus struck the helpless might not have been stayed by her father’s blood. If her father were in the way of something—she knew not what—might there not be others similarly threatened? The resiliency of her youth refused merely to accept the situation.

They came to a fork in the lane, one turn of which led past Beech Lodge and then on to their own small house. Mrs. Millicent took the other turn instinctively, but Jean, for some reason she could never explain, felt a sudden impulse to pass this time by the road they had both hitherto avoided. She stopped, and her mother glanced back with surprise.

“What is it, dear?”

“I don’t know, mother, but”—she hesitated—“I rather want to go this way.”

“But why?”

“I can’t tell you, really. It’s rather an odd feeling. Would you much sooner not?”

It flashed into Mrs. Millicent’s mind that perhaps she had been unwise in allowing her own shrinking timidity to influence the girl. The only reason she had to put forward sounded a little too personal to carry much weight, and if time was healing the wound in Jean’s heart, should she not be thankful—and show it?

“Very well, dear,” she said slowly. “Perhaps it is better to begin this way. I think I’d like your arm.”

They went on thus, with unvoiced recognition of remembered things. Came the bend in the lane beyond which lay Beech Lodge, and the older woman seemed to feel the knife in her own 

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