They did not feel sorry for her. A second time, no doubt, would find them humanly sympathetic, troubled, distressed, but this first time they could only wonder, they could only doubt their senses. It would have been most offensive in them to have let her see they noticed anything unusual in her behaviour. At least that is the way they felt about it in their failure to understand. For five minutes Mrs. Tresslyn stood with her back to them. Gradually the illy-stifled sobs subsided and, as they still looked on curiously, the convulsive heaving of her shoulders grew less perceptible, finally ceasing altogether. Her tall figure straightened to its full, regal height; her chin went up to its normal position; her wet handkerchief was stuffed, with dignified deliberateness, into the gold mesh bag. A minute more to prove that she had completely mastered her emotions, and then she faced her children. It was as if nothing had happened. She was the calm and imperious mother they had always known. Involuntarily, Anne uttered a deep sigh of relief. George blinked his eyes and also fell to wondering if they had served him honestly, or if, on the other hand, he too had merely imagined something incredible. They did not question her. The incident was closed. They were never to ask her why she had wept in their presence. They were never to know what had moved her to tears. Instinctively and quite naturally they shrank from the closer intimacy that such a course would involve. Their mother was herself once more. She was no longer like other women. They could not be in touch with her. And so they were never to know why she had cried. They only knew that for a brief space she had been as silly as any ordinary mortal could be, and they were rather glad to have caught her at it. Years afterward, however, George was to say to Anne: "Queer thing, wasn't it, that time she cried? Do you remember?" And Anne was to reply: "I've never forgotten it. It _was_ queer." Nor did Mrs. Tresslyn offer the slightest explanation for her conduct. She did not even smile shamefacedly, as any one else certainly would have done in apology. She was, however, vaguely pleased with her children. They had behaved splendidly. They were made of the right stuff, after all! She had not been humbled. Apathy was restored. George slumped down in his chair and set his jaws hard. Mrs. Tresslyn glanced idly through the pages of a magazine, while Anne, taking up her position once more at the window, allowed her thoughts to slip back into the inevitable groove. They were not centred upon Templeton Thorpe as an object of pity but as a subject for speculation: she was thinking of the thing that Braden was doing, and of his part in this life and death affair. She was trying to picture him up there in that glaring little room cutting the life out of a fellow creature under the very eyes of the world.