No thought disturbed her of her future relations to her husband or sons. For more than a third of a century, the lives of her husband and herself had flowed together, each relying on the other, each confident in the other. Breakage was not possible or to be thought of. He would not even ask her of this matter, and while that very fact would lay on her the greater weight of responsibility to tell him, the necessity did not put her under that fear which would have been the greatest burden to an ordinary woman. By this she did not mean that he would not feel the wound--feel it cruelly; but they had passed the crown of the road, their way lay downward, and she had no more doubt of him than she would have had of herself, if to him and not to her the parentage of Theodore Wing were brought home. Her bulwark with the public would be the loyalty of her husband and sons, and if it smacked of selfishness and unfeeling to rely on them and not give a fair portion of thought to the suffering which would be hidden by their calm exterior, it must be remembered that during the entire period of her wife- and mother-hood she had lived with this thing, which had grown dimmer and dimmer as the years receded, until it had come to have for her, and it seemed to her necessarily for these others, a different aspect than it would have borne in the days before she had given to husband and children the pledge of her long devotion. Before these years she would have reasoned of her husband’s attitude toward such a tale from the sense of outrage, not tempered by long possession and intimate association. No, she had no fear there, save of the inward sense of humiliation under which she had gone to her son’s office, and for fighting which she now faced her own reflection, as representative of the world of public opinion. She had become accustomed to make demands of the world, not requests, and the world had yielded. It should do so still. This thing had not destroyed the years of loyalty and work that buttressed her present position. It should not do so. She stood there to make her defiance, and the world should heed. But oh, the waiting! The waiting! That was the cruelty of the situation. CHAPTER XV In Matthewson’s Chambers Charles Matthewson read with impatience the name on the card just brought him--Isaac Trafford. It was a breach of the understanding between them, that this man should trouble him further. He was on the point of refusing to see him, when he recalled Trafford’s possession of the papers taken from Theodore Wing’s desk after his murder. This he had not known at the time of their previous interview. It was possible that here was the opening of negotiations for their sale. He ordered him admitted. Still he could not avoid resenting the intrusion. “I understood you were not to trouble me further.” “Until I became satisfied that your visit to Millbank had something to do with Wing’s murder,” the detective answered.