"He tries his best to," said the girl with a hopeless little smile, "but he can't. Oh, it's quite true!"--she stopped her mother's protest by a gesture. "I knew it before I married him. Jemmy told me--Oh, do you think I would have done such a thing, do you dream I would have accepted such a sacrifice, if I had seen anything else to do? If I had guessed that Mr. Channing really wanted me?--I belonged to Mr. Channing, Mother.--Now do you see what you have done?" Kate had risen, too, her hands shaking. A strange and appalling thought had forced itself into her head. She asked in a sort of whisper, "Daughter, _why did you marry Philip_?" The answer came with a terrible simplicity, "Because I did not want to be like Mag Henderson. Because I thought--if a baby came--you never can tell--it would be better to have a father for it." In the silence that followed, innumerable little familiar home-sounds came to Kate's ears; the crackling of a log in the fire, a negro voice out of doors calling "Soo-i, soo-i," to the pigs, Big Liza in the distant kitchen chanting a revival hymn while she washed the dishes. Her eyes in that one moment took in, as do the eyes of a drowning person, every detail of her surroundings; the sturdy masculine furniture covered incongruously with its wedding crétonne, the piano and books that had been a part of her childhood's home, her open office beyond, with its business-like array of maps and ledgers; and all these things seemed to accuse her of something, of being a traitor to some trust. Her eyes came to rest at last upon the old flintlock rifle over the mantel-shelf, beneath the wooden, grim-faced Kildare who had carried it. "And I did not kill him!" she muttered aloud, as if in apology to the rifle. Jacqueline, who had been watching her fearfully, ran with a little cry and clung to her close. "Mummy, don't look like that, don't stare so queerly! You frighten me," she wailed. "Didn't you guess--didn't you understand, when I told you how I adored him? I--I thought you would. How could I help it? I didn't know--I--Oh, Mummy!" Kate with a gesture brushed aside her incoherences, brushed aside the thing she was confessing--a thing she saw to have been inevitable, taking into account the girl's nature, her inheritance ("From both sides," the mother reminded herself, grimly), and the man she had had to deal with. Kate told herself she was a fool not to have suspected it from the first; or rather to have allowed Channing to dull her suspicion of it with his halting statement that he was, after all, "a gentleman." Even in that moment of sickening surprise, she faced and accepted and took upon herself the burden of her child's weakness. It was not that sin which roused in her a rapidly mounting tide of furious anger against Jacqueline. It was her sin against Philip Benoix.