I gave a start so violent that I turned my tea-cup completely over, and, putting it hastily to rights again, saw Mrs. Bulkley looking her grimy handkerchief over carefully to find a promising bit to rub her glasses with. Her false front was much awry, and her small eyes were red, and she was finishing, as she had begun, with the assertion that “Mrs. Worden was breaking up, no doubt of that, since she had taken up with a theatre-girl, of all people on the footstool, well! well!” I thanked the “Busy B” for her tea and her information, and I greatly fear I proved an unsatisfactory confidant for Mary, who dearly loved plenty of “oh’s!” and “ah’s!” and “did you ever’s?” while she poured forth tales of the numbers of magnificent male creatures who madly pursued her through life, she always baffling them, however. By the way, she must have kept up her habit of baffling the magnificent ones, because she eventually married a baker with a veritable low-comedy name, by the side of which “Bowersocks,” would look grave and dignified. The pain I felt in hearing Mrs. Worden coarsely and disrespectfully spoken of opened my eyes to the extent of the veneration and affection I had grown to feel for her. That creature in whom the world saw a desolate woman, whose haughty, old head was held high, and whose piercing, hawk’s eye spied out its weakness, but in whom I saw the wearily faithful, old watcher, by the restless lake, waiting through the long years, always “waiting for the sign.” To me, her sorrows had made her sacred. I had never seen any creature who seemed so absolutely bloodless as did old Mrs. Worden, and no matter how often I might meet her, the moment my eye took in the waxen pallor of her face, I experienced an uncanny feeling of familiarity. I would ask myself, “Of whom does she remind me?” knowing all the time that I had never seen anyone who resembled her in the slightest degree. But one day as she sat, as ever, facing the lake, with her eyes cast down upon her cup, the cold, dull light falling upon the clear-cut features of her wax-white face, turning it into a veritable mask of death, I looked steadily at the hollow of her temples--not the faintest pulsation there. I gazed steadily at her throat--not a pulse-beat could I see, though I knew my own full throat would throb and swell at times as though it had an independent existence. As I looked, I thought, if she should run a needle deep into her finger I believe nothing would follow its withdrawal, and so, like a flash, it leaped into my mind who she was like. The very counterpart of old King Duncan! He of the mighty tragedy--the victim of that woman who raved in her crime-haunted sleep; not of pity at his “taking off,” not of remorse, but only of that stupendous surprise: “Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him!”