She went to the end of the hall and stood leaning over the banisters; she could hear Miss White's flurried voice; then, suddenly, he spoke. It was only some grave word,--she did not catch the sense of it, but the sound--the sound of his voice! It turned her dizzy. Before she knew it she sank down on the top step of the stairs, her head against the banisters. She sat there, her face haggard with unshed tears, until Mrs. Richie came out of Nannie's room and found her. It was then that David's mother, who thought she had done her best in the courteous commonplace of how-do-you-do--suddenly did better; she stooped down and kissed Elizabeth's cheek. "You poor child!" she said; "oh, you _poor_ child!" The pity of the slender, crouching figure touched even Helena Richie's heart,--that heart of passionate and resentful maternity; so she was able to kiss her, and say, with wet eyes, "poor child!" Elizabeth could not speak. Later, when the mother and son had left the house, Miss White came upstairs and found her still sitting dumb and tearless, on the top step. She clutched at Cherry-pie's skirt with shaking hands: "Did he say--anything?" "Oh, my poor lamb," old Miss White said, nibbling and crying, "how could he, _here?_" David, coming with his mother over the mountains to be present at Mrs. Maitland's funeral, thought to himself how strange it was that it had taken death to bring him to Mercer. In all those long months of bewildered effort to adjust himself to the altered conditions of life, there had been an undercurrent of purpose: _he would see Elizabeth._ He would know from her own lips just how things were with her. It seemed to David that if he could do that, if he could know beyond doubt--or hope--that she was happy, he would himself be cured of the incessant, dull ache of remorse, which quickened sometimes into the stabbing suspicion that she had never really loved him. ... If she was happy, then he need no longer blame himself for injuring her. The injury he had done himself, he must bear, as men before him had borne, and as men after him would bear, the results of their own sins and follies. He had, of course, long since lost the wincing self-consciousness of the jilted man, just as he had lost the expectation that she would send for him, summon him to storm her prison and carry her away to freedom! That was a boy's thought, anyhow. It was when that hope had completely faded, that he began to say he must see for himself that she was happy and that she did not wish to leave the man who had, at any rate, been man enough to take her, and whom now, very likely, she loved. It was the uncertainty about her happiness that was so intolerable to him. Far more intolerable, he thought, than would be the knowledge that she was content, for that he would deserve, and to the honest mind there is a certain satisfaction in receiving its deserts. But his hatred of Blair deepened a little at the mere suggestion of her contentment. Those evil