As to Teddy’s message, nominally sent from Paterson, Lizzie had betrayed a skepticism which the three girls found disconcerting. She said nothing, but it was precisely the saying nothing that puzzled them. When they themselves grew expansive over the things they would buy with the money Teddy was going to make, the mother’s faint smile was alarming. It was alarming chiefly because it combined with other things to produce that effect of strangeness they had all noticed in her since their father died. Though they couldn’t define it for themselves, it was as if she had renounced any further effort to make life fulfill itself. She was like a man on a sinking ship, who, after casting about as to how he may save himself, knows there is no choice left but to go down, and so becomes resigned. Having thrown up her hands, Lizzie was waiting for the waters to close over her. Jennie was thus uneasy about her mother, as she was uneasy about Bob, uneasy about Hubert, and, most of all, uneasy about herself. By the time she was ready she heard Lizzie stirring in her bedroom. It was the signal agreed upon. She was free to go, which meant that she was free to turn her back on all her more or less sheltered past and strike out toward a terrifying future. She felt as she had always supposed she would feel on leaving her home on her wedding day; and she would do as she had decided she would do in that event. She would go without making a fuss, without anything to record that the going was different from other goings, or that the return would be different from other returns. She would make her departure casual, without consciousness, without admitted intentions. She merely called to her mother, therefore, through the closed door, that she was on her way, and her mother had called out in response, "Very well." This leave-taking making things easier—all Jennie had to do was to gulp back a sob. CHAPTER XVIII But as Jennie opened the door to let herself out, two men were standing on the cement sidewalk in front of the grassplots, examining the house. They were big, heavily built men, who, although in plain clothes, suggested the guardianship of law. It came to Jennie instantly that their examination of the house was peculiar; and of that peculiarity she divined with equal promptness the significance. The men declared afterward that in her manner of standing on the step and waiting till they spoke to her there was the same kind of "give-away" as when her brother had eyed them across Broad Street. The older and heavier of the two advanced up the walk between the grassplots. "This is the Follett house, ain’t it, miss?" Jennie replied that it was. "And you’re Miss Follett?" She assented again. "Is your brother in?" "N-no; he’s not in town." The big man turned toward his taller and slighter colleague, whatever he had to say being communicated by a look. Having expressed this thought, he veered round again toward Jennie, speaking politely.