"Walk!" her husband protested. "What do you walk for? It's cold as Greenland on the ice, and, besides, they were cutting at the pool by the Bend; you don't want to go that way, Milly. Take the stage round."

Mrs. Dilworth crumbled a piece of bread with shaking fingers, and said nothing.

"What time are you going, mother?" inquired Edwin.

"In the afternoon, about four."

"Why, you went there only two days ago," Edwin said, irritably. "I saw you on the back road carting a big bundle."

"It would have been more to the point if you'd done the carting for your mother," Tom Dilworth said, sharply.

His wife paled suddenly at that word about a bundle, but the subject was not pursued. Edwin said, grumbling, that he didn't see what possessed his mother to choose such an hour. "It's too dark for a lady to be out," Edwin protested.

"Too dark for a--_grandmother_!" his father said. "Don't you criticise your mother, young man." And then he added: "Look out for the places where the men were cutting, Milly. It hasn't frozen over yet."

And Mrs. Dilworth said, after a pause, "I know."

That night was a misery of dreams that the deed was done, broken by wakings desperate with the knowledge that it was yet to do. In the morning she seemed to have lost all power of words; she bore her husband's reproaches that Ned was late for breakfast; she went about her household duties; she watched the girls start for school (she did not kiss them; demonstrations of affection had never been possible to this dumb breast; but she stared after them with haggard eyes); and through it all she hardly uttered a word; when she did speak, it seemed as though she had to break, by agonizing effort, some actual lock upon her lips. When the girls had gone she looked about for her eldest; but Ned was not to be found. "I never knew him to go to the store before breakfast," she thought, miserably. His father, pulling on his coat in the hall, said that Ned was getting industrious to go to his work so early! His wife was silent.

When he started, whistling cheerfully,

[Ill.u.s.tration: music fragment]

she watched him from the window, straining her eyes until he was out of sight. Then she went up-stairs to her bedroom, and, opening his closet door, leaned her head against one of his coats, trembling very much.

Afterwards she wandered about the house in aimless, restless waiting for Ned.

In the course of the morning Tom sent over to inquire why the boy had not come to the store. Milly told the messenger to tell Mr. Dilworth that Mr. Edwin was not at home. "Say I thought he was at the store,"

she said. "I'll give him his father's message when he comes in to dinner." But he did not come in to dinner; and minute by minute the afternoon ticked itself away. She had said to herself that she must start about four, before Nancy and Mary got home from school. "It must be so that it would be dark when I was coming back," she reminded herself. "If I leave here at four, and get my bundle from Mrs. Kensy at five, it would be pretty dark by the time I would be going home.

Mrs. Kensy will tell them that it was dark."

At four Edwin had not appeared; Milly, having no imagination, had no anxiety; she merely gave up, patiently, the hope of a wordless good-bye. But she kept looking for him; and when she finally put on her things, she paused and turned back to the window, to look once more towards Old Chester; but there was no sign of Ned. It did not occur to her to postpone her plan; her mind, run into the mould of sacrifice, had hardened into rigidity. So at last, miserably, the tears running down her face, she stepped out into the cold and went down through the garden to the river. There she turned and looked back, with dumb pa.s.sion in her eyes; the firelight was winking from the parlor windows and all the warm commonplace of life seemed to beckon her. She put her m.u.f.f up to wipe her eyes, but she made no prayer or farewell; her silence had reached her soul by that time.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THERE SHE TURNED AND LOOKED BACK"]

It was very cold; the ice was rough, and the wind had blown the dry snow about in light drifts and ripples, so that walking was not difficult. She trudged out, up towards the Bend, skirting the place where the men had been cutting. They had gone home now, and the ice about the black, open s.p.a.ce of water was quite deserted. The wind came keenly down the river, blowing an eddy of snow before it; the bleak sky lay like lead over the woods along the sh.o.r.e. There was not a house in sight. Amelia Dilworth looked furtively about her; then she bent down and sc.r.a.ped at the snow on the edge of the ice, as one might do who, in the water, was struggling for a hold upon it. After that, for a long time, she stood there, looking dumbly at the current running, black and silent, between the edges of the ice. At last, her hand over her mouth to check some inarticulate lament, she stooped again, and put her little black m.u.f.f on the broken snow close to the water.

When she reached Mrs. Kensy's she was quite calm. She said briefly that she had come to order some chickens; "--and I'll take that bundle I asked you to keep for me."

The woman brought it, and Milly tucked her fingers through the stout strings she had tied so carefully a few days before. When she would open it in the woods, and put on the new dress and shawl and the heavy veil that it held, and then, in the dark, take the half-past-five train, no one would know that Thomas Dilworth's wife had fled away into another State. They would find the m.u.f.f, and they would think--there would be only one thing to think.

"I want the chickens for Sunday," she said; "please send them over on Sat.u.r.day." Then it came into her mind with a little gush of happiness that she would pay for them on the spot, instead of having the bill sent to Tom, as was her custom; she had drawn a sum of money from the bank a fortnight ago--a small sum, but her own; now it was all in her purse; she would buy Tom's Sunday dinner out of her little fund.

Except to leave him, it was the last thing she would ever do for him.

She put her hand into her pocket--and chilled all over. Then stood blankly looking at the woman; then plunged her hand down again into her pocket; then exclaimed under her breath; then tore her bag open and fumbled distractedly among brushes and night-gown and slippers; then pulled her pocket wrong side out with trembling fingers.

"_My purse!_" she said, breathlessly. Then she searched everything again.

"It ain't any difference," Mrs. Kensy protested.

"I must have left it at home. I can't go back for it. It is too late."

"What for?" said Mrs. Kensy.

"The--the train."

"Oh, you was going on, was you?" Mrs. Kensy said. "Well, I can let you have the price of a ticket a little ways."

But Mrs. Dilworth, with shaking hands, pulled everything out of her bag, shook her skirts, fumbled in the bosom of her dress, ran out and searched the garden-path, strained her eyes across the snow on the river--all in vain. "Oh, my!" she said, faintly.

"But I can lend you the price of a ticket, ma'am," Mrs. Kensy said again.

"No matter," Mrs. Dilworth said, dully. "I'll go home."

Even as she spoke she heard the train tooting faintly far up the valley. She sat down, feeling suddenly sick.

V

There was nothing to do but to go home. She remembered now how in her agitated watching for her son she had put her purse down on the corner of her bureau--and left it there. Yes; there was nothing to do but go back. "I can start to-morrow," she said to herself. But in the sick reaction of the moment she knew that she could never start again; her purpose had been shattered by the blow. She took her bundle--the bundle that meant flight and disguise and self-sacrifice, and that stood for the shrewdness which is so characteristic of the kind of stupidity which forgets the purse--and went stumbling down in the darkness to the river. She said to herself that she must get her m.u.f.f; and she thought heavily that it would be pretty hard to carry so many things across the ice. She was numb with the shock of interrupted ecstasy. She could not feel even mortification--only fatigue. She was so tired that, seeing in the darkness a hurrying figure approaching her, she did not recognize her husband until he was almost upon her.

"_Milly_? My G.o.d! Milly!"

He had her m.u.f.f in his hand, and as he reached her he caught at her shoulder and shook her roughly. "Milly--I thought--I thought--" He stammered with agitation. "I found this m.u.f.f, and I thought it was yours; and Neddy's gone, too, and I thought--both of you--"

"Neddy _gone_?" she repeated, dully.

She stood still on the ice, trying to get her wits together.

"He's disappeared. He isn't in town. He went out early this morning.

To skate, I suppose. Nora saw him from her window; at about six, she says. And this open water"--she felt him quiver at her side--"and then this m.u.f.f--"

"No!" she said. "I--I made a mistake." She did not take in the words about Ned.

"But where is he? n.o.body's seen him. I suppose I'm a fool, but I'm uneasy. I came to meet you because I thought you might know. But when I saw this m.u.f.f--it is yours, Milly, isn't it?--I got into a panic about you, too."

"Why," she said--"it's mine; yes. I--I left it--I suppose. Neddy wasn't with me. Did you think he was with me? I don't understand,"

she ended, bewildered.

"He hasn't been at home all day," her husband said, "nor in town, either." And then he repeated the story, while she looked at him, slow understanding dawning in her eyes.

"Neddy--gone! Where?"

"But that's what I don't know," the father said.

And his wife, dazed still, but awake to the trouble in his voice, began to comfort him, alarm rising slowly in her own heart like an icy wave.