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THE mother was sitting over her cookstove. She was almost crouching over it. With her hands tightly clasped she seemed as though she was striving with every resource of her being to support herself under the crushing weight of the great grief with which she was beset. Her widely gazing eyes were straining with the mental anguish behind them. And they were utterly unseeing for all they stared into the ruddy heart of the fire shining between the upright bars. Stony misery looked out of them, that dreadful expression of heartbreak which seems to leave a woman powerless, helpless.

The living room about her was neat, and of its usual orderliness. It lacked nothing of the housewifely care that was usually bestowed upon it. For all the poverty of its furnishing, it was a place of comfort, which, even under Rebecca Carver’s suddenly imposed grief, had not been allowed to suffer. Her daughter Claire had seen to that. For the time her mother was submerged in her trouble, and the girl herself was no less stricken, but will and youth in the latter had overridden every weakness of the moment.