Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/78

 fault or neglect of the mother. Ket, who had come when she was twenty-six, was the baby she had intended.

She had married, for the first time, three years ago and not for love but for companionship, choosing a good, steady widower of fifty, a methodical man and utterly dependable, and given neither to questioning her past nor to jealousy of forgotten lovers. Since he was a railroad conductor, and took an early run on Sunday, she had the coffee pot on the gas-burner before seven o'clock and, when she went to the porch for the milk, she saw the newspaper.

Great, black letters, turned upside down to her, spelled her name—the only name she ever had had until three years ago when she gained John Folwell's.

"Ketlar's," the paper said. "Ketlar's Wife Shot Dead."

Anna Folwell bent down and grasped for the paper, but it slipped from her fingers, and she merely pushed it right side about before she read: "Fred Ketlar, boy leader of the Echo Garden Orchestra, held for murder of his wife."

Anna seized it in both hands and carried it into the kitchen. She put her back against the door and pushed it shut behind her and leaned against it, staring at the black page which told her no more, except the description of the bullet wound which had killed her son's wife, and that her son was discovered in his flat, where he had been drinking with a girl; that he had a fresh hurt on his head, which he did not satisfactorily explain, and that he gave a contradictory account of his doings last night.

Anna, his mother, gasped to herself, "You didn't do it, Freddie! My Freddie, you didn't do it!" But a dire, fateful fear clamped upon her heart, doubting not her boy directly, but herself. Because he was hers, he had