Page:A Good Woman (1927).pdf/443

 "She must have been plain always," thought Emma. "She's really a repulsive woman."

Then she rose and, going into the kitchen, lifted an iron plate from the stove, and thrust into the coals the letter and the picture postcard, sending them the way of that other letter left by Jason twenty-seven years earlier.

One thing in the letter she could not forget—"I knew he'd come back to me."

It was a little more than a year later that Moses Slade and Emma Downes were married quietly in Washington, but not so quietly that Sunday newspapers did not have pictures of the bride and bridegroom taken outside the church. They had come together again, through the strangest circumstances, for Moses, still unmarried, had found himself suddenly involved with Mamie Rhodes, who Emma had once said "did something to men." He was, in fact, so involved that blackmail or the ruin of a career seemed the only way out. . . the only way save marriage with some woman so prominent and so respectable as to suffocate any doubts regarding his breach of morality. "And what woman," he had asked himself, "fitted such a rôle as well as Emma Downes, who was now a widow . . . a real widow whose troublesome son was dead." He saw with his politician's eye all the protection she could give him as a prominent figure, known for her moral strictness and respectability, pitied for the trials she had borne with such Christian fortitude. Such a woman, people (voters) would say, could not marry him if the stories about Mamie Rhodes were true.

So he had gone to Emma and, confessing everything, thrown himself upon her mercy. For five days she kept