The calamity at the Courtlands' struck on all their acquaintance like a nip of icy wind, sending a shudder through them, making them, as it were, huddle closer about them the protecting vesture of any hope or any happiness that they had. The outrage on the child stood out horrible in the light of the mother's death: the death of the mother found an appalling explanation in the child's plight. Whether the death were by a witting or an unwitting act seemed a small matter; darkness and blindness had fallen on the unhappy woman before the last hours, and somehow in the darkness she had passed away. There was not lacking the last high touch of tragedy; the catastrophe which shocked and awed was welcome too. It was the best thing that could have happened. Any end was better than no end. To such a point of hopelessness had matters come, in such a fashion Harriet Courtland had used her life. The men and women who had known her, her kindred, her friends, and her household, all whom nature had designed to love her, while they shuddered over the manner of her going, sighed with relief that she was gone. The decree of fate had filled the page, and it was finished; but their minds still tingled from it as they turned to the clean sheet and prayed a kinder message. Grantley Imason, so closely brought in contact with the drama, almost an eye-witness of it, was deeply moved, stirred to fresh feelings, and quickened to a new vision. The devastation Harriet had wrought, Tom's cowardly desertion, the pitiable plight of the children, grouped themselves together and took on, as another of their company, the heightened and freshened impression of stale sentimentality, and a self-delusion trivial to vulgarity, which he had carried away from his encounter with Walter Blake. To all this there seemed one clue; through it all one thread ran. He felt this in the recesses of his mind, and his fingers groped after the guiding-line. That must be found, lest, treading blindly through the labyrinth, he and his too should fall into the pit whence there was no upward way. They had been half over the brink once: a preternatural effort--so it might properly be called--had pulled them back; but they were still on the treacherous incline.