"But where--what--we had at one time five thousand dollars at least in the savings bank. I happened to know of that small account. I supposed of course there was more. There is no trace of even that, the administrator says." "That went into the extra expenses of the year Lydia made her debut. And her wedding cost a great deal, he told me one day--and her trousseau--and other expenses at that time." Used as the doctor was to the universal custom of divided interests among his well-to-do patients, it did not seem too strange to him to be giving information about her own affairs to this gray-haired matron. She was not the first widow to whom he had been forced to break bad news of her husband's business. Mrs. Emery stared at him, her dry lips apart, a glaze over her eyes. He thought her expression strange. As she said nothing, he added, with a little sour pleasure in defending his dead friend, even if it should give a prick to a survivor, "The Judge was so scrupulously honest, you know." The widow sat down and laid her arms across the table, still staring hard at the doctor. It came to him that she was not looking at him at all, but at some devastating inner sight, which seared her heart, but from which she could not turn away her eyes. He himself turned away, beginning to be aware of some passion within her beyond his divination. There was a long silence. Finally, "That was the reason he would not stop working," said the woman in a voice which made the physician whirl about. He looked sharply into her face, and what he saw there took him in one stride to her side. She kept her stony eyes still on the place where he had been--eyes that saw only, as though for the first time, some long procession of past events. "I see everything now," she went on with the same flat intonation. "He _could_ not stop. That was the reason why he would never rest." She got slowly to her feet, smoothing over and over one side of her skirt with a strange automatic gesture. She was looking full into the doctor's face now. "I have killed him," she said quietly, and fell as though struck down by a blow from behind. Her long, long illness was spent in the Melton's home, with the doctor in attendance and Julia Sandworth, utterly devoted, constantly at hand. The old Emery house, the outward symbol of her married life, was sold, and the big "yard" cut up into building lots long before she was able to sit up. Lydia came frequently, but, acting on the doctor's express command, never brought Ariadne. The outbreaks of self-reproach and embittered grief that were likely to burst upon the widow, even in the midst of one of her quiet, listless days, were not, he said, for a child to see or hear, especially such a sensitive little thing as Ariadne. Those wild bursts of remorse were delirious, he told Lydia, but to his sister he said he wished they were. "I imagine they are the only times when she comes really to herself," he added sadly.