They opened the door and made loud sounds of protest as she slipped through, causing Reuben to look up from the bureau where he was opening his letters and to see both Phoebe standing in his office and the actors at the door. He waved them off and, when the door was closed, “Well?” he said. “Reuben!” said Phoebe. He rose with an angry cry. How dared she, this weaver, this roughened, withered old woman, address him by his Christian name? This gray wraith, whose hair hung mustily about her like the jacket of lichen about a ruined tree, she to call him by the name his Dorothy alone had used! That morning of all mornings it was outrage of outrages. He did not know her whom once he nearly loved. Twenty years ago he had put her from him and had excluded her from his recollection. Long ago the factory had outgrown the stage when an employer has knowledge of his workpeople as individuals; he did not know her nor had the identification of the prisoner as John Bradshaw, a spinner in the factory, conveyed any personal significance to him. Bradshaw was a common name, and he had never known that Phoebe had called their son John. “But I am Phoebe,” she said, standing her ground before his menacing advance. “Phoebe, Reuben. Phoebe, who--Phoebe Bradshaw.” He remembered now, he had remembered at the second “Phoebe”--and at the second “Reuben.” He was even granting her, grimly, her right to call him by that name when the “Bradshaw” struck upon his ear. “Bradshaw?” he repeated. “Bradshaw?” And this second time, there was an angry question in it. “I came about John,” she said. “John is our son, Reuben. Of course he did not know, but--” Reuben had covered the space between them at a bound. He was holding her hands tightly, he was looking at her with eyes that seared. In moments like these, thought outspaces time. John, his wife’s murderer, was his son, and the son of Phoebe Bradshaw whom he had--well, he supposed he had betrayed her. She had told the son, of course. He had nursed a grievance, he had shot Dorothy in revenge. Whether he had aimed at Reuben and hit Dorothy, or whether he lied when he had made that statement to the constable and had, in fact, aimed at Dorothy, they had the true motive now. Reuben might have put it that his sin had found him out, but his thought did not run on those lines. Then, what was she saying? “Of course, he did not know.” Oh, that was absurd, that took them back for motive to what John had been telling the constable--that he shot at Hepplestall to--to--(what was the boy’s wind-bagging phrase which the constable reported?)--“to set the people free from a tyrant.” “Say that again,” he said. She met his eye fearlessly. “Of course he did not know. You could not think that I would tell of my shame. Father and I, we invented a second cousin Bradshaw whom I married, who died before John was born.”