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Just for a moment she stood regarding the bowed figure with troubled eye. She saw the crumpled news-sheet, one of the papers which Ivor had left with them the day before. It was crushed under her arms as they rested in her lap. And she understood. Her mother had been reading again, perhaps for the hundredth time, that brief newspaper story which was the source of the nightmare of disaster which had fallen upon them.

The girl was tired and utterly dispirited. Somehow her tall, graceful figure seemed slightly bowed out of its usual courageous bearing. Her pretty eyes were ringed about, as though, in the absence of observation, she had yielded to her woman’s expression of grief. But now, at the sight of the silent, tearless figure at the stove, she summoned every ounce of her youthful courage to her aid. She moved across the room quickly, and deliberately removed the paper from beneath the yielding arms.

“Must you, mother?” she said quietly, but with a sharpness she was wholly unaware of. Then she added as she smoothed out the paper, “Will it do any good? You’ve read the story till—till you’re nigh sick. You’ve read it till I just can’t bear seeing you read it any longer. I guess I’ll need to burn it if I don’t want to have you set crazy.”