I was silent. It is something I am so ignorant of. The old Ducketts are the nearest approach to divorce that we have in our mountain world. Recently, without a word to any one, that poor old lady left her home and moved to a little house across the street. Our village has wondered and gossiped about this rupture after sixty years of life together. Poor old lady, she slips in the back door of his house when he is sitting at the front door, and does up the work she has done for sixty years; then she slips home again. “A woman can’t judge”—the girl’s voice with a defiant note in it brought my thoughts with a start back from the Ducketts, and to her—“unless it is her own problem. She, the other woman, wanted him to leave baby and me. He dropped the letter on the floor and I picked it up and read it. I don’t know why I did it. I had perfect faith in him. She said all her happiness was at stake; she eliminated our happiness—baby’s and mine.” “But, child”—my mind took a wider circle than it had ever had need of in Marsville—“any woman might fall in love with another woman’s husband and try to take him from her. I know a coloured woman whose husband beats her, and when I try to make her leave him and live on a nice little place we have and do our washing, she says she would leave her old man but that she might not find another, that husbands is so ‘scase.’ They must be from the way some women behave. Perhaps your husband was not at fault.” The lovely colour mounted to her face, it quivered as she told me that he had acknowledged it. We were both silent then. But presently I asked if he had gone to the other woman. She murmured no. “He says that he is penitent.” Her eyes were stormy. “He begs me to take him back. Upon what foundation would I build my faith in him again?” I think my own answer surprised me. “Bodies sometimes sin when souls are clean,” I said. “It could have been a passing sin of the body that did not touch the spirit, which is still true to you. If the spirit sinned he would not want to come back—he would not be sorry. Oh, child, don’t you see?” “I never—did see—it like—that.” The girl’s words trailed like broken winged birds, her face paled. We were under the shed in Washington and a solitary passenger, travelling bag in hand, was coming down the aisle of our coach. At sight of her, for he did not know me, his face whitened, too. In one great throb of my heart I took in the situation. I knew that he was her husband, and that he loved her. I saw it in the flash of his face at sight of her—a blind man given back his sight might look out on his restored world with a look like that. In a lightning-like flash of time I had leaped to my feet, pushed him into the seat where I had been, and, without in the least knowing what I was saying, I heard myself say: “You foolish children. Go back to the little grave and put the two urns for flowers together. Then start life all over again.”