Later in the day she knocked timorously at his study door. She had come with a silly little proposition that he let her take the infant and go South as if to join Isabel. Thus the trunk would not lie in the express office down there, unclaimed and breeding awkward inquiries, and she from that point, with him at this, could keep up the illusion they had invented until Isabel herself should--eh--return! But when he let her in, he stood before her a silent embodiment of such remorse and foreboding that she could have burst into sobs and cries. Yet she broached her plan, trembling visibly, while he heard her through with melancholy deference. In reply he commended it, but called to her notice how much better it would be for her to go alone. Then the babe, left behind, would be an unspoken yet most eloquent guarantee that its mother would soon reappear. "Very true," responded the emboldened lady; "yet on the other hand"-- He put out an interrupting touch. "The child is as safe with me as if it were in its mother's bosom." "Oh, it isn't so much a question of safety as"-- The father interrupted again, with a gleam in his eyes like the outflashing of a knife. "I hold the child against all comers, and would if I had to slay its mother to do it." Mrs. Morris stifled an outcry and would have left him, but he would not let her. "Stay! Oh, listen to a soul in torment! The babe is already motherless. Isabel can never return, mother; she is with the dead. I am not waiting idly here for her; I am waiting busily--for her slayer. He has fled; but when he sees he is not pursued he will come back to the spot,--to the black, black hole. He cannot help it. I _know_ that. Oh, how well I know it! And the moment he comes he is caught,--caught in the web of proofs I am weaving!" He held her arm and gazed into her gazing eyes in ferocious fear of the web she might be weaving for him; while she, reeling sick with fear of him, tried with all her shaken wits to sham an impassioned accord. "And you _will_ wait?" she exclaimed approvingly. "You will not stir till the thing is sure?" He would not stir till the thing was sure. [Illustration: "I am waiting busily for her slayer."] As soon as it was dark enough to slip over to the Byingtons' unseen, she went, bearing to Ruth Isabel's apologetic good-bys, trying her small best to play at words with the General, and quickly getting away again, grateful for a breath of their atmosphere, though distressfully convinced that Ruth had divined the whole trouble, through the joy betrayed by herself on hearing that Leonard would be away for a week. She went home and slept like a weary child, and neither the next day nor the next, nor the next, was so awful as this first had been; they lacked the crackle and glare, and the crash, of the burning and falling temple. XX A DOUBLE RETURN