She turned and walked away from him. She wanted to run, but would not allow herself to run. She walked slowly, shoulders squared, head up proudly. She did not hurry as she traversed the hall and ascended the stairs, nor as she opened the door of her room. She entered, closed the door gently--and locked it. Then she stood quite still, white and slender, with a look on her face not good to see on the face of a young girl. Her fists were clenched, her arms held tense and straight at her sides. There was no tear or sign of tear in her eyes. She looked not like a living flame now, but like a slender image of steel heated to whiteness. "I hate him," she said, slowly, not passionately, but coldly, with calculation. Then she repeated it, "I hate him.... I hate him." She took off hat and wraps and let them fall to the floor, then walked across the room to her dressing-table and looked at herself in its mirror. She saw how pinched and white and strained she looked, and bit her lip.... On the dressing-table in a silver frame was a photograph, the photograph of a woman still young. It was a strong face, a gentle face, a face that in some vague way showed that the spirit within had not been satisfied or happy. Hildegarde lifted it in her hands. "You _married_ him," she said, in a whisper. "_Married_ him.... You lived with him of your own accord--for years.... How could you? How _could_ you?" Hildegarde did not know that she herself was the answer to that question. Born within a year of her mother's marriage, she had tied her mother to that home and to the man who was the father of the child. It had not taken years to disillusion Marcia von Essen with respect to her husband; the first trying hours of marital life had sufficed to show her the sort of man to whom she had given herself, for he had shown her none of that gentleness, that consideration, that tenderness that form so sure a foundation for the coming years. More marriages are wrecked within twenty-four hours of the ceremony than are wrecked in the succeeding twenty-four years. Marcia von Essen's was one of these.... She might have separated herself from him almost at the beginning of their marriage, but time was not given her to catch her breath and form the resolution when was forced upon her the knowledge that her thought must include a third being. So she remained, and so, for Hildegarde's sake, she endured the years. "How could you?" Hildegarde asked. The photograph might have replied, "For you, my daughter." Hildegarde put down her mother's picture and sat down on the rounding seat in the bay window. Her posture was girlish, childish; back against the wall, feet on the cushion, she drew her knees under her chin and stared out at the snow-covered lawn, the wealth of shrubs swathed in white, down the slope to the barren expanse of frozen lake. Her thoughts were dangerous thoughts, and to a reckless, turbulent soul thoughts likely to take material shape in rash action.