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 alone until God saw fit to lift the cross from her shoulders.

One afternoon when Moses Slade had left, still breathing fire and thunder against Krylenko, she sat for a long time alone behind the screen, in the restaurant, looking out of the window. Her eyes saw nothing that passed, for she was seeing far beyond such things as shop-fronts and trolley-cars. She was thinking, "What has come over me lately? I haven't any character any more. I'm not like Moses, who goes on fighting like an old war horse. I've let things slide. I haven't faced things as I should. I've humored Philip, and see what's come of it. When I kept hold on the reins everything went well, and now Philip's ruining himself and going straight to the Devil. I should never have allowed Naomi to leave the house. She's wax in his hands, with all her softness—she can never manage him and he needs to be managed just as his father did. If I'd treated his father the way Naomi treats Philip . . . God knows what would have happened."

She began automatically to stack the dishes on the table before her, as if she had gone back to the days when the restaurant had been only a lunch-room and she had herself waited on her customers.

"I must take hold," she told herself. "There's only one thing to do . . . only one thing. . . . I must go and see Mary Conyngham. I must talk to her face to face and have it out. He's my son. I bore him. I gave him life, and I have a right to save him."

A kind of feverish energy took possession of her. It seemed that she could no longer sit there seeing the whole structure of her life going to ruin. She would