Mrs. Farrar rose from her chair and followed her guest toward the door.
"There's only one thing I want to ask of you besides being good to my children after I am gone, and that is that you will not take Mr. Farrar's love away from me during the little while that I shall live." She held out her hands imploringly, and her voice rose in a passion of entreaty: "If you only knew how I have loved him, and what he has been to me, and how I want him for just this little while"
But her guest had gone. Shocked, humiliated, terrified, she had turned her back to the beseeching woman, and had fled through the hall, out at the door, and down the steps to the walk and to the street. She pulled close the thick veil that had shielded her face from the March wind, so that it might also shield it from the gaze of the people whom she should meet, and hurried, with ever-increasing consternation, toward her home.
What had happened? What had she done? Of what had she been guilty? Whose fault was it that this dreadful thing had come to pass? Vivid, soul-searching questions and thoughts tumbled tumultuously through her brain. Memories of the last half year came flooding back into her mind. Talks, confidences, sympathies, greetings and farewells, the touch of his hands on hers that day, the look in his eyes, in her own heart the emotion that she could not, and dared not attempt to define. And the wider her thought went, the more deeply she searched herself, the redder grew the blush of shame upon her cheeks, the more intolerable became her burden of humiliation. And always, in her mental vision, stood that distracted woman, with the gray face and beseeching eyes, and white lips moving with words that no wife should have spoken, and no other woman should have heard.
At the foot of the broad street that leads up to Fountain Park she met Philip Westgate. She would have passed him by, but he blocked her path.
