Her mother, Eades and Modderwell accurately represented the world she knew. And the newspapers, in their eagerness for every detail touching the tragedy, however remotely, would publish the fact! "This morning Miss Elizabeth Ward, daughter of Stephen Ward, the broker, called on the Koerner girl. Fashionably dressed--" She could already see the cold black types! It was impossible, unheard of. Gusta had no right--ah, Gusta! She saw the girl’s face, pretty as ever, but sad now, and stained by tears, pleading for human companionship and sympathy. She remembered how Gusta had served her almost slavishly, how she had sat up at night for her, and helped her at her toilet, sending delicious little thrills through her by the magnetic touch of her soft fingers. If she should send for Gusta, how quickly she would come, though she had to crawl! And what, after all, was it that made it hard? What had decreed that she, one girl, should not go to see another girl who was in trouble? Such a natural human action was dictated by the ethics and by the religion of her kind and by all the teachings of her church, and yet, when it was proposed to practise these precepts, she found them treated cynically, as if they were of no worth or meaning. That very evening the representatives of the law and of theology had urged against it! At breakfast her mother sat at table with her. Mrs. Ward had breakfasted an hour earlier with her husband, but she had a kindly way of following the members of her family one after another to the table, and of entertaining them while they ate. She had told her husband of Elizabeth’s contemplated visit to the prison, and then had decided to say nothing of it to Elizabeth, in the hope that the whim would have passed with the night. But Mrs. Ward could not long keep anything in her heart, and she was presently saying: "I hope, dear, that you have given up that notion of going to see Gusta. I hope," she quickly added, putting it in the way she wished she had put it at first, "that you see your duty more clearly this morning." "No," said Elizabeth, idly tilting a china cup in her fingers, and allowing the light that came through the tall, broad windows to fill it with the golden luminosity of the sun, "I don’t see it clearly at all. I wish I did." "Don’t you think, dear, that you allow yourself to grow morbid, pondering over your duty so much?" "I don’t think I’m morbid." She would as readily have admitted that she was superstitious as that she was morbid. "You have--what kind of conscience was it that Mr. Parrish was talking about the other night?" Mrs. Ward knitted the brows that life had marked so lightly.