When Mrs. Holmes had gone, teetering uncertainly down the front steps to her carriage, Freddy's mother, pausing a moment in the hall to make sure that Mr. Andrew Payton's silk hat had been dusted, went heavily up-stairs and sat down in her big cushioned chair. She wished that she had something to do. Of course, there was that new puzzle--but sometimes the thought of a puzzle gave her a qualm of repulsion, the sort of repulsion one feels at the sight of the drug that soothes and disgusts at the same moment. The household mending was a more wholesome anodyne; but there was very little of that; she had gone all through Freddy's stockings the day before, and found only one thin place. To-day there seemed nothing to do but sit in her soft chair and think of Freddy's shocking talk and how unkind Mrs. Holmes was about Mortimore. She knew, in the bottom of her heart, that her son's presence was painful to everybody except herself; she knew that Freddy didn't like to have people call, for fear they might see him, and that her reluctance dated back to her childhood. "But suppose she doesn't like it, what has that got to do with it?" Morty's mother thought, angrily; "it's a question of duty. Mama doesn't seem to remember that Freddy ought to do her duty!" It came over Mrs. Payton, with a thrill of pride, that she herself had always done her duty. Here, alone, with everything silent on the other side of the bolted door, she could allow herself to think how well she had done it! To Mortimore, first and foremost--she paused there, with a pang of annoyance at her mother's words: "I do _not_ love him best!" she declared. She did her duty to Freddy, just as much as to Morty. When Fred had scarlet fever no mother could have been more devoted. She hadn't taken her clothes off for four days and nights! Her supreme dutifulness, however, a dutifulness of which she had always been acutely conscious, was in enduring Andrew's behavior. "Some women wouldn't have stood it," she thought, proudly. But what a good wife she had been! She had let him have his own way in everything. When he was cross, she had been silent. When he was drunk, she had wept--silently, of course. When he had done other things, of which anonymous letters had informed her, she had still been silent;--but she had been too angry to weep. She shivered involuntarily to think what would have happened if she had not been silent--if she had dared to remonstrate with him! For Andrew Payton's temper had been as celebrated as the brains which had once filled the now empty hat. "Some wives would have left him," she told herself; "but I always did my duty! Nobody ever supposed that I--_knew_." When Andrew died, and her friends were secretly rejoicing over her release, how careful she had been to wear the very deepest crape! "I didn't go out of the house, even to church, for three weeks, and I didn't use a plain white handkerchief for two years," she