"But I can't go to bed until you do, darling. I get so worried about you," she answered. "Why in heaven's name, should you worry about me? I am all right," he responded crossly. She saw her mistake, and with her unvarying sweetness, set out to rectify it. "Of course, I know you are--but we have so little time together that I don't want to miss the evenings." "So little!" he echoed, not unkindly, but in simple astonishment. "I mean the children sit up late now, and of course we can't talk while they are playing in the room." "Don't you think you might get them to bed earlier? They are becoming rather a nuisance, aren't they?" He said it kindly enough, yet tears rushed to her eyes as she looked at him. It was impossible for her to conceive of any mood in which the children would become "rather a nuisance" to her, and the words hurt her more than he was ever to know. It seemed the last straw that she could not bear, said her heart as she turned away from him. She had borne the extra work without a complaint; she had pinched and scraped, if not happily, at least with a smile; she had sat up while her limbs ached with fatigue and the longing to be in bed--and all these things were as nothing to the tragic confession that the children had become "rather a nuisance." Of the many trials she had had to endure, this, she told herself, was the bitterest. Though her feet burned and her muscles throbbed with fatigue, she lay awake for hours, with her eyes wide open in the moonlight. All the small harassing duties of the morrow, which usually swarmed like startled bees through her brain at night, were scattered now by this vague terror which assumed no definite shape. The delicacy of Lucy's chest, Harry's stubborn refusal to learn to spell, and even the harrowing certainty that the children's appetites were fast outstripping the frugal fare she provided--these stinging worries had flown before a new anxiety which was the more poignant, she felt, because she could not give it a name. The Pendleton idealism was powerless to dispel this malign shadow which corresponded so closely to that substance of evil whose very existence the Pendleton idealism eternally denied. To battle with a delusion was virtually to admit one's belief in its actuality, and this, she reflected passionately, lying awake there in the darkness, was the last thing she was prepared at the moment to do. Oliver was changed, and yet her duty was plainly to fortify herself with the consoling assurance that, whatever happened, Oliver could never really change. Deep down in her that essential fibre of her being which was her soul--which drew its vitality from the racial structure of which it was a part, and yet which distinguished and separated her from every other person and object in the universe--this essential fibre was compacted of innumerable Pendleton refusals to face the reality. Even with Lucy's chest and Harry's lessons and the cost of food, she had always felt a soothing