Her eyes turned inward and backward. Wildly she tried to understand how this thing could have happened. Then, suddenly, realization came to her. Her face was dead white, her lips stiff when she announced the ultimatum: “The reason he didn’t say anything the day we got here was because he thinks I took it. He thinks I’m a thief. He wouldn’t make me the mother of his children because in his heart he believes I’m guilty.” Then Mahala dropped over in merciful unconsciousness. Far in the night, a heavy moon ray, falling persistently on her face, aroused her. She drew herself up on her bed and lay as she was till she heard Jason’s step on the back porch the next morning. Then she forced herself to her feet, unlocked the door, and went out to meet the day as if it were going to be exactly like any other day that had passed before it. In the days that followed, Mahala learned that the extent to which the human heart can be tortured is practically without any limit. One may suffer and suffer for years, only to discover that there are still unplumbed depths of pain and degradation to which one may be forced. In these days she really was a primitive creature, stripped to the bone. She was seeing herself now, not as she always had seen herself, but as other people were seeing her, and slowly there was beginning to rise in her heart the feeling that if some one did not do something to reëstablish her before the world and in her own self-respect, she would be forced to do it herself. With every ounce of strength she had, she fought herself to keep Jason and Ellen from seeing that she was suffering, that once more the power to see beauty had left her eyes. Her ears no longer heard song; hourly they were tortured by the sound of her own voice muttering in dazed amazement: “He thinks I’m guilty!” CHAPTER XVIII “A TRIUMPH IN MILLINERY”