She had difficulty in finding any one who would stop long enough to tell her about the brain-storm that was sweeping Ashwater, but soon she had the essentials of what had occurred from people with whom she talked upon the street. She struggled for self-control, but in spite of herself she grew terribly excited over the recitation of the tragedy that the Morelands had worked in the lives of Rebecca Sampson, of Mahala, of Jason, of hundreds of other people. She had known Rebecca all the years of her residence in Ashwater. She at once understood that Martin Moreland had lured her, Marcia, from her home in an adjoining county to the little house in which she had lived for so many years, for the sole purpose of using her as his tool in taking care of Jason. He had made love to her in the most alluring manner possible to him, and hers had been a nature that gave without question and without fear. For him she had sacrificed relatives and friends and gone with him willingly. Both the questioning and the fear she now knew came later, and in an intensified form. What she realized was, that, through all the best years of her life, under cover of a menial task, she had been merely a servant for Martin Moreland. It was not true that he was bound in an unhappy marriage from which he was vainly striving to free himself, as he had told her in the beginning. He had never meant to free himself. He had never intended to offer her marriage and an honourable position. He had planned to take everything she had to give; to have her take care of the boy, for whom she had always struggled to keep from forming an attachment, because the threat had hung over her that any minute he chose Martin Moreland would take him away. Her mind was milling over her own problem; there then came the problem of Rebecca Sampson, and she saw, that even before he had determined on the wreck of her life, Rebecca had gone down; yet these people were saying that he had admitted that he was legally married to her. Rebecca had been weak, a clinging thing, a tender, delicate girl; yet she had a spirit and a resistance that he could not break; so he had been forced to marry her. No one on the streets knew from where she had come or who her people were. They remembered that a young thing lacking mentality was sheltered by a little house in the outskirts. The few who had tried to make friends with her in the beginning had been repulsed with insane spasms so menacing that they had allowed her to go her way, as people in that day were permitted to go, even though it was known that they lacked balanced mentality.