"My conscience is clear," said Janet, and her gaze, spiritual, exalted, patient, showed that she spoke the truth, that her mother's looks and words left her quite unscathed. Ross vented a vicious, jeering laugh. His mother, overcome with the sense of helplessness, collapsed from rage to grief and tears. She turned to Mrs. Ranger. "Your Hiram was right," she wailed, "and my Charles said so just before he went. Look at my daughter, Ellen. Look at my son--for he, too, is robbing me. He has his own fortune that his dead father made for him; yet he, too, talks about his legal rights. He demands his full third!" Adelaide did not look at Ross; yet she was seeing him inside and out, the inside through the outside. "My heartless children!" sobbed Matilda. "I can't believe that they are the same I brought into the world and watched over and saw that they had everything. God forgive them--and me. Your Hiram was right. Money has done it. Money has made monsters of them. And I--oh, how I am punished!" All this time Ellen and Adelaide had been gradually retreating, the Whitneys following them. When Mrs. Whitney at last opened wide the casket of her woe and revealed Ross there, too, he wheeled on Adelaide with a protesting, appealing look. He was confident that he was in the right, that his case was different from Janet's; confident also that Adelaide would feel that in defending his rights he was also defending hers that were to be. But before Del there had risen the scene after the reading of her own father's will. She recalled her rebellious thoughts, saw again Arthur's fine face distorted by evil passions, heard again her mother's terrible, just words: "Don't trample on your father's grave, Arthur Ranger! I'll put you both out of the house! Go to the Whitneys, where you belong!" And then she saw Arthur as he now was, and herself the wife of Dory Hargrave. And she for the first time realized, as we realize things only when they have become an accepted and unshakable basic part of our lives, what her father had done, what her father was. Hiram had won his daughter. "We are going now," said Ellen, coming from the stupor of shame and horror into which this volcanic disgorging of the secret minds and hearts of the Whitneys had plunged her. And the expression she fixed first upon Janet, then upon Ross, then upon Matilda, killed any disposition they might have had to try to detain her. As she and Adelaide went toward her carriage, Ross followed. Walking beside Adelaide, he began to protest in a low tone and with passionate appeal against the verdict he could not but read in her face. "It isn't fair, it isn't just!" he pleaded. "Adelaide, hear me! Don't misjudge me. You know what your--your good opinion means to me." She took her mother's arm, and so drew farther away from him. "Forgive me," he begged. "Janet put me out of my mind. It drove me mad to have her rob--_us_."