"You must be!" her mother cried, clutching her, "You've just got to be! One of us has got to be all right—surely God wouldn't mind just one of us being all right—that wouldn't hurt Him———"
"Hush, hush, mother! Hush!"
But Mrs. Adams only clutched her the more tightly. "He seemed such a nice young man, dearie. He may not see this in the paper—Mr. Lohr said it was just a little bit of an item—he may not see it, dearie———"
Then her anguish went back to Walter again; and to his needs as a fugitive—she had meant to repair his underwear, but had postponed doing so, and her neglect now appeared to be a detail as lamentable as the calamity itself. She could neither be stilled upon it, nor herself exhaust its urgings to self-reproach, though she finally took up another theme temporarily. Upon an unusually violent outbreak of her husband's, in denunciation of the runaway, she cried out faintly that he was cruel; and further wearied her broken voice with details of Walter's beauty as a baby, and of his bedtime pieties throughout his infancy.
So the hot night wore on. Three had struck before Mrs. Adams was got to bed; and Alice, returning
