Contrary to her expectations, they did not come into the library, but went into the parlor, the door of which was partially ajar, so that every word they said could be distinctly heard where Katy sat. It would seem that they were continuing a conversation which had been interrupted by their arriving home, for Mrs. Cameron said, with the tone she always assumed when sympathizing with her son. “Is she never more cheerful than when I have seen her?” “Never,” and Katy could feel just how Wilford’s lips shut over his teeth as he said it; “never more cheerful, but worse if anything. Why, positively the house seems so like a funeral that I hate to leave the office and go back to it at night, knowing how mopish and gloomy Katy will be.” “My poor boy, it is worse than I feared,” Mrs. Cameron said, with a little sigh, while Katy, with a great gasping sob, tried to rise and go to them, to tell them she was there—the mopish Katy, who made her home so like a funeral to her husband. But her limbs refused to move, and she sank back powerless in her chair, compelled to listen to things which no true husband would ever say to a mother of his wife, especially when that wife’s error consisted principally in mourning for the child “which but for her imprudence might have been living then.” These were Wilford’s very words, and though Katy had once expected him to say them, they came upon her now with a dreadful shock, making her view herself as the murderer of her child, and thus blunting the pain she might otherwise have felt as he went on to speak of Silverton and its inhabitants just as he would not have spoken had he known she was so near. Then, encouraged by his mother, he talked again of her in a way which made her poor aching heart throb as she whispered, sadly, “He is disappointed in me. I do not come up to all that he expected. I do very well, considering my low origin, but I am not what his wife should be.” Wilford had not said all this, but Katy inferred it, and every nerve quivered with anguish as the wild wish came over her that she had died on that day when she sat in the summer grass at home waiting for Wilford Cameron. Poor Katy! she thought her cup of sorrow full, when, alas! only a drop had as yet been poured into it. But it was filling fast, and Mrs. Cameron’s words, “It might have been better with Genevra,” was the first outpouring of the overwhelming torrent which for a moment bore her life and sense away. She thought they meant her baby—the little Genevra sleeping under the snow in Silverton—and her white lips answered, “Yes, it would be better,” before Wilford’s voice was heard, saying, as he always said, “No, I have never wished Genevra in Katy’s place; though I have sometimes wondered what the result would have been had I learned in season how much I wronged her.”