What Tilly answered Joel refused to hear. He was too honorable a man to listen further, and he turned back and with slow, weighty steps reached his home again. He stood in the kitchen doorway, waiting. He heard Tilly and the children coming. They were singing merrily and romping like sprites across the meadow. "I'm coming! I'm coming! I'll catch you! Boo!" Tilly cried. "Hide from him, darling--hide behind the bushes! Where is she, brother? She must be lost. Oh, there she is!" This was followed by childish screams of delight and the mother's cooing words. Joel went to meet them, advancing across the yard and taking little Tilly into his arms. "I know we are late," his wife said, regretfully, "but grandmother came part of the way back, and you know she walks slowly." "It is all right," Joel said, pressing little Tilly's cheek to his. "It is not very late." "Well, I'll hurry with the supper," Tilly answered. It was significant, he reflected, that she did not mention then the reception of the startling news by Mrs. Trott. Even while they all sat at the table Tilly failed to bring it up, and a general air of repression brooded over them. Indeed, the children had been put to bed, the dishes washed, and husband and wife were alone together in the moonlight at the door, and still the subject in the minds of both had been avoided. He wondered if she expected him to mention the matter. Surely she ought to know that it was not exactly the thing that he, a mere outsider, had the right to pry into. An awkward silence fell between them, the sort of silence that surely boded ill for their future harmony of intercourse. Tilly seemed to sense this, and suddenly put her shoulder to the wheel of duty. "I didn't get to tell grand-- I didn't get to tell Mrs. Trott, after all." It was significant that she abruptly discarded a formerly accepted term of endearment. "Mr. Cavanaugh was there this morning for that purpose, so--so the greater part of her excitement was over when I got there." "But she was happy, of course," Joel got out, well knowing that his remark was an empty one. "Oh yes, of course." Tilly was silent for several minutes. Then she added: "The poor woman is afraid that John will not forgive her. She doesn't want help from him, she declares, and she thinks it would be unwise for them ever again to meet face to face, but she says she would like for him to know how sorry she is for many things. I think, myself, Joel, that it would be inadvisable for--for them to meet, just at present, anyway. Don't you?" "I don't know. I can't say. I'm not in a position to decide," Joel floundered. "It would depend on him. It is unfortunate that so many miles separate them. He evidently has some established way of living into which she might not fit so well. The mere fact of his being still alive reached her by accident and through no effort on his part."