"I didn't know, I.W.! Don't kill me for what I didn't know!" She crouched back from his knotted face, and he sprang then out of bed, nightshirt flapping about his knees, and his fists and his bulging eyes raised to the quiet stars. "God," he cried, "help me to keep hold of myself! Help me! You--you--" His voice was so high and so tight in his throat that it stuck, leaving him in inarticulate invocation. "I.W.!" "My child engaged to--to her mother's--you--you--" "I.W.! Do you see now? You wouldn't let him have her! You wouldn't, I.W.! Tell me you wouldn't!" "I want him if he touches her to be struck dead! I want him to be struck dead!" "Thank God!" said Mrs. Goldstone, weeping now tears that eased her breathing. Suddenly he leaned toward her, his voice rather quieter, but his forefinger waggling out toward the open door. "You go!" he said, and then in a gathering hurricane of fury, "go!" "I.W., don't yell! Don't! Don't!" "Go--while I'm quiet. Go--you hear?" She edged around him where he stood, in fear of his white, crouched attitude. "I.W.!" He made a step toward her, and, at the sound in his throat, she ran out into the hallway and down the stairs to the porch. In the deep shade of the veranda's elbow a small figure lay deep in sleep in the wicker rocker, one bare arm up over her head and lips parted. In a straight chair beside her Mrs. Goldstone sat down. She was shuddering with chill and repeating to herself, quite aloud and over and over again: "What have I done? What have I done? What have I done?" She was suddenly silent then, staring out ahead, her hands clutching the chair-arms. To her inflamed fancy, it was as if, beyond the hedge, the old disused hitching-post had become incarnate and, in the form of her naive and horned conception, was coming toward her with the whites of his eyes bloodshot. A PETAL ON THE CURRENT Were I only swifter and more potent of pen, I could convey to you all in the stroke of a pestle the H2O, the pigment of the red-cheeked apple, the blue of long summer days, and the magnesia of the earth for which Stella Schump was the mortal and mortar receptacle. She was about as exotic as a flowering weed which can spring so strongly and so fibrously from slack. And yet such a weed can bleed milk. If Stella Schump was about fourteen pounds too plump, too red of cheek, and too blandly blue of eye, there was the very milk of human kindness in her morning punching up of her mother's pillows and her smoothing down of the gray and poorly hair. She could make a bed freshly, whitely, her strong young arms manoeuvering under but not even jarring the poor old form so often prone there. There was a fine kind of virile peasantry in the willing hands, white enough, but occasionally broken at the nails from eight hours of this box in and that box out in a children's shoe department. Differing by the fourteen pounds, Watteau would have scorned and Rubens have adored to paint her.