As soon as it was possible for Mahala to escape from the Moreland residence, she left Ashwater and was driven back to her home. She sought it instinctively as a shelter. It seemed to her that the River Road was unending, that she never again would see the light of her house; and because there was no light when she reached it, she was surprised at last to find that she was there. As a haven she plunged into it and closed the door behind her to shut out the horrors she had witnessed. Predominant in her mind at that minute was the thought that there was nothing in the whole world so dreadful as the power of riches wrongly used. When she thought back to the peace, the happiness, the sheer beauty of her childhood and her home life, it seemed to her quite impossible that such disaster as had overtaken her had been made possible by the unscrupulous power of one man holding his position through the right of riches dishonestly accumulated. After the passing of her father, after the testing of her own strength, she had found that she was sufficient; that she could take care of herself and of her mother as well. There was the possibility that she might find a confident sort of happiness in facing life and making it clothe and provision her that she never would have found had she gone ahead under her father’s sheltering care. She had come dimly to realize that the sheltered life is rather a dull affair. It lacks the spirit, the development, the fraternity that can be found in an equal battle with other men and women for food and shelter. Then had come the final blow. The Morelands had heaped dishonour upon her. From that hour she had felt that to be vindicated was the only thing that life held in store for her. Now the thing had happened. A thousand people had rushed around her. They had almost crushed her in their desire to touch her, to weep with her, to tell her that they always had known that she never could have been guilty. And there had been an impulse hot in her soul to cry out at them: “Why, then, was I deserted? Why, then, was I left alone? Why, then, did you not rise up and make the thing that happened to me impossible as you have made it impossible for the work of the Morelands upon their fellow men to continue?” The thing that dazed her, that kept sleep from her eyes, the knowledge of how weary she was from her brain, and sent her wandering from one room to another all through the night, and at the break of day, to the little gold bird that still sang in her window, to the garden, and from the garden to the pigeons, and from the pigeons to the calves, and back again to the cases of her father’s books and to the pictured faces of Mahlon and Elizabeth—the one thing that she found predominant out of the whole matter, the one thing that in the end mounted above everything else, was the fact that Jason had doubted her, that because he doubted her, he had made another woman his wife, the mother of the child that should have been hers.