"What does he know? For God's sake, what does he know? What did you tell?" "Oh, that I met you, had dinner, went to the theatre--" "Then why--" "I'm coming to that. While we were away somebody--Mrs. Weatherwax, I suppose--filled Joe full of malicious town gossip about our--our friendship--and he was terrible. Oh, you can't know, you can't know!" "But me--me!" cried Shelby, clutching her by the arms. "What about me? Is he down on me? His votes,--his two hundred votes, you know,--they could defeat me--ruin me! Tell me--tell me--" "No, no; it's not you he blames; not you, Ross. It's I. He thinks I'm a fool--the brute! He calls me a fool!" "Thank God! Thank God!" ejaculated the man, laughing wildly in his revulsion of relief. "But I--I am miserable," sobbed the woman, and clung to him when he would have released her. "You will go to your triumph and your future,--what have I left now?" Shelby swayed unsteadily with his burden, his eyes on the perfect shoulders whose curves played and quivered with the labored breath. He recalled a fragment of poetry--something about "morbid . . . faultless shoulder-blades," which he had overheard Bernard Graves quote to Volney Sprague as Mrs. Hilliard passed at the club. Morbid had seemed an inept word then, but he began to spy out a certain fitness. The house was too still by far--dangerously still; the stillness of espionage. With a flash of intuition he lifted his eyes, and in the doorway met Joe Hilliard. Almost at the same instant the woman in her trumpery saw him too. "Joe!" she called, in an incredulous, husky whisper. "Joe!" He loomed there in the dusk like a rock, and with a frightened whimper she tottered and clung to him as she had clung to Shelby. "I'm not a bad woman, Joe," she babbled. "I'm not a bad woman." "No one has accused you," replied her husband, putting her gently away. "Nor am I what you doubtless think," stammered Shelby. "It's all a mistake, Joe; a big mistake. It can be explained--it can be explained--" Hilliard doubled and relaxed a mighty fist. "No; not under this roof," he said quietly. "Go!" CHAPTER XII