The meaning of it, the incredible sordid horror of the thing she had half learned, began to come home to her. Her father's wife! "Threatening!" Archie's jaw set. "Here, that won't do!" He strode forward, Joan following. They both heard the man say with leering distinctness, "It ought to be worth a _little_ cash to a loving husband to learn the sort of woman he's married up with, Ef, old girl!" Then Archie's hand fell on his shoulder. Joan never forgot the face her step-mother turned upon them--She made a desperate attempt to rally. "Why--why, dearie! is that you? A--an old friend of mine's been giving me a tip." "Get out," said Archie to the man. "Get out, quick!" "Hold on there, kid--So, you been robbing the cradle this time, Ef?" He grinned at her evilly. "Wait a minute, mister, there's a few things I might be able to tell you about this party--" "Nothing I don't know already," muttered Archie, his grip tightening. "You've got five minutes to get off the grounds before I tell the police. Blackmail's a penitentiary offense in this State." The man hesitated, looked at Archie's grim jaw, and went.... Joan and her step-mother gazed at each other. The woman's face had a curious gray look under its perennial bloom, and she moistened her lips with a dry tongue. "You--you heard?" she said at last. Joan nodded. She could not speak. It was Archie who remarked quietly: "You'll want to be going home, I guess. I'll get a taxicab." Then sheer pity overcame the horror in the girl's mind. "Yes, Mother. Come home with me!" she murmured. For the first and last time in her life she had called her father's wife "Mother." CHAPTER XXXV "I guess you've got to have the whole story now, though it ain't a very pretty story to tell a girl," said Effie May wearily. "I don't know as your papa would much want you to hear it, Joan...." To the girl the whole episode seemed unreal, part of that strange day, with the holiday crowds, the brief, hectic excitement of the races, followed by the pistol-shot that meant the death of a ruined old woman. She could not believe that she, Joan Darcy, convent-bred, the daughter of reserved and fastidious people, could be actually participating in this impossible melodrama. "What my father would wish hardly matters now, I think," she said, more frigidly than she realized. "Please say what you have to say." All the way home her step-mother had wept, steadily and hopelessly, with ugly snuffling noises that took away what dignity there might have been in her grief. Joan, always helpless in the face of uncontrolled emotion, made no effort to comfort her. Her impulse of pity had already died into disgust. She could not look at that swollen, grayish face, of whose careful complexion tears made strange havoc.