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 "It's the truth. Beyond that I don't care what you believe."

"I want you to leave him alone."

Suddenly Mary stood up. "I was leaving him alone. I meant never to see him, but I won't leave him alone any longer. He would have been mine except for you. He's belonged to me always and he needs me to protect him. No, I won't leave him alone any longer."

All at once she began to cry, and turning, she ran from the room and up the stairs. Emma, left behind on the horsehair sofa, felt suddenly foolish and outwitted. She was certain that Mary meant not to come back, but she remained in the cool, quiet room for a long time, as if her dignity demanded such an action. And at last, baffled and filled with a sense of flatness, she rose and walked out of the house.

The whole visit had been a failure, for it hadn't come properly to a climax. It was ended before it began. But she had (she felt) done her best, all that a mother could do to save her only son. She had laid herself open to insult. . . . A block from Mary's house she discovered that in her agitation she had forgotten her gloves. She halted abruptly, and then resumed her way. They didn't matter. They were old gloves, anyway.

She couldn't bring herself to go back and enter that depressing house again.

Upstairs in the room where the two children were asleep in their cribs, Mary lay on the bed and wept. Until this moment her love had seemed a far-off, distant thing, to be cherished sadly and romantically as hopeless, but now, all at once, it had become unbearably real. She saw Philip in a new way, as some one