"You're old enough to be looking for a wife. Will." After a few confidential chats Judith could talk to him as though she had his welfare at heart. "Those girls in Woodridge have served their purpose, but you don't want to be playing around all your life."

He grew very red and muttered something unintelligible, but she saw that the idea was not unpleasing to him.

"I think you should go to the next party, and if you don't like going alone why don't you ask Miss Ann to let you take Thorne?" Judith threw in this suggestion carelessly, expecting to meet with reluctance, if not actual rejection. To her surprise the idea was accepted with a promptness that startled her. Will said he would speak to his mother.

Ann Tomlinson, when approached, was likewise surprisingly co-operative. She seemed quite willing for Thorne to attend the neighborhood taffy pulls and sleigh rides with her younger son. And when Thorne, pleased and excited at the prospect of wearing her pretty dress wondered if Richard would approve, she was told to say nothing to Richard about it. Judith laughed to herself at the way the three of them, unwittingly and with conflicting purposes, conspired wth her to keep Richard in ignorance of what was going on.

Her health began to improve after that. Before long she was going out again with her husband. They were seen together at church on Sundays. They attended the midwinter lecture course in Woodridge. From time to time there were guests at Timberley, and no one was merrier than Judith. It would have seemed that the simple circumstance of young Will taking Thorne to a neighborhood party now and then was all that had been needed to restore her health and tranquillity. For Richard, when he learned of the parties, did not disapprove. He seemed only glad that Thorne was having fun like other young folks.

It was this outward semblance of peace, sanity, and good spirits which made the more shocking Judith's collapse when it came.

Since the night Otis Huse slept in the downstairs bedroom her mind had been teased mth. uncertainty as to whether he had made any discovery. During the autumn it was this desire to know if the doll was still under the floor of the closet and her lack of nerve to investigate which had made her ill. Now, fortified by her new feeling of security about Thorne, she determined to find out once and for all if the doll had been found.

She waited till an afternoon when Miss Ann had gone over to her daughter Jane's and Richard was in Woodridge. Will and Jesse Moffat were busy in the sugar orchard, and the children were at school. Judith was alone in the house except for Millie, whose presence in the kitchen was attested by the lusty strains of "O! Susanna" coming through the covered passage.

Judith went boldly to the downstairs bedroom and opened the door. Her nerves were as calm as though this were not the room in which she had seen bricks come through a window, only to disappear when they hit the floor.

The room was dusky with drawn blinds and cold with the chill of the fireless grate. She did not linger to look about her. She went straight to the closet door. As she passed the tall canopied bed she heard a sound like something whizzing through the air and the next moment felt a coil about her neck. She screamed, but her scream was strangled as the noose—or whatever it was—tightened, choking her until she lost consciousness. . . .

Cold air blowing across her face restored her. The outer door was open, and Richard was standing there. But the person bending over Judith, sponging her face with a wet towel, was Thorne. And on the floor beside Thorne was a jumping rope. She had been coming from school, she said, when she heard the scream and ran into the house through the dining room a few seconds before Richard entered by the outside door. He had heard his wife's scream as he rode up the lane.

Judith sat up, and as her strength returned words poured from her mouth, ugly venomous words, accusing Thorne of trying to kill her with a piece of rope. Richard paid no heed to her raving. He carried her upstairs to her room and dispatched Thorne for his mother. And when Will came in shortly after he was sent to Woodridge for the doctor.

Dr. Caxton was just sitting down to supper when Will rode up to his house. To the disgust of his elderly housekeeper, the doctor left his meal untasted (there would be a better one for him at Timberley) and went out to the stable where his horse stood, still saddled from the day's rounds. He wondered what in damnation was the matter with Richard's wife now. If it wasn't one pain it was another, and not a thing the matter with her (as he'd been telling Richard for years) that a baby wouldn't take care of. If you wanted to keep a woman healthy, keep her pregnant.

And then the doctor's aging memory clicked into place. He hadn't been telling Richard anything about this wife for vears. It was Judith—not Abigail—whom he was going to see.

Yet the feeling that he was repeating a timeworn procedure was still with him when he reached the house. As he puffed upstairs after Richard he said irritably, "Why'd you move her up here?" And when the answer came, ''Judith's room has always been up here," he felt all kinds of a fool. But when he sat down at the bedside he had a strange sense of having lived the scene before. The woman with the haggard eyes and restless hands plucking at the collar of her nightgown might have been Abigail, so familiar were the words which greeted him.

"I don't want a doctor. There's nothing the matter with me that a doctor can cure. Go away! I don't want anyone near me but Richard."

He asked, "How long has she been like this?"

"I found her in this state when I came home this afternoon."

"Had anything happened to upset her?"

"I'll tell you later."

He administered a dose of laudanum. Being unused to sedatives, the patient succumbed quickly to its soothing effect. Her mutterings ceased, her nervous twitchings quieted, her eyelids drooped. In a few minutes she was asleep.

Ann Tomlinson had come into the room. She offered to sit with her daughter-in-law while the two men went down and had their supper. How many times had Richard's mother performed this same service, when the woman in the bed had been Abigail instead of Judith.

Dr. Caxton determined to have a straight talk with Richard as soon as they were alone. But Will was likewise in the dining room, and Thorne was putting supper on the table for the three of them, so there was no opportunity to ask Richard what had happened to throw his wife into hysterics.

Thorne had eaten earlier, but at Richard's suggestion she slipped into Judith's chair and presided over the teapot with a quaint little air of importance, as though she felt her responsibilities as temporary mistress of the house. Richard, from the moment he sat down, relaxed noticeably. He did not speak of his wife's illness beyond asking the doctor if a good night's sleep wasn't the best medicine she could have. Being assured that it was, he accepted the steaming cup which Thorne handed him and began to talk of other things.

He talked about neighborhood matters, news of the town, books they had been reading, politics; he talked with a quiet zest, like a man who was at ease and feeling good. It occurred to the doctor that this was a strange way for a man to feel whose wife lay ill upstairs. It was as though he had been carrying a heavy load up a hill and had put it down for a moment to rest.

It came as a slight shock to Dr. Caxton, a little later, that Richard's curious relaxation stemmed from Thorne's presence behind the teapot. He could not have told how or why the idea presented itself, for Richard took no notice of her except to glance her way now and then, and Thorne did not join in the conversation, which was mostly man-talk. She busied herself with supplying the wants of three hungry males, and this she did as efficiently as Ann Tomlinson herself might have done. She refilled empty cups and replenished empty plates with a cheerful largess suggestive of a good housewife who likes to see her menfolk eat. If Thorne's hospitality lacked the polish which Judith had brought to the Tomlinson table,

it was somehow more in keeping with the farm atmosphere. Perhaps it was this absence of formahty which put Richard at his ease. Perhaps it was the knowledge that everything he did was correct in the eyes of the lady behind the teapot. If he violated all rules of etiquette by demanding maple syrup on his pie, Thorne not only refrained from censure but co-operated by supplying the syrup.

Suddenly the doctor was struck by a truth so simple it amazed him. All these years, when people had wondered at Richard's fondness for this child, they had missed entirely its significance. Thorne was probably the only person in the world with whom he was completely himself. A doctor might sit down to eat with these two every day for the next forty years and never once hear the word "nerves." For where a man and his wife know completion in each other there is no friction. Only Thorne, of course, was not Richard's wife. For a moment Dr. Caxton forgot her youth and thought irritably that she should have been.

The longer he watched them, the more he was struck with his unique discovery. Why hadn't Ann Tomlinson seen what to him was perfectly obvious: that this waif from a carnival was the only woman in the world who would ever be able to cope with the dreams, the inconsistencies, the lovable vagaries which were the sum and substance of her son Richard? Thorne would never require him to toe the mark of Abigail's dogmatism, nor fit into the mold of Judith's sophistication. Thorne would simply love him and let him alone.

Why hadn't Richard been able to see this and hold his patience for a little while? To an old man nearing seventy, two years was such a little while. If Richard hadn't made that damn-fool second marriage ...

So engrossed did the doctor become in his own speculations that it came as a second shock when young Will said to him, "Have you noticed how Thorne is growing up. Doc? I had the belle of the ball on my hands at Jennie Barclay's the other night." Great Scott! Will Tomlinson beauing the child? This would never do.

"How old are you, Thorne?" asked the doctor.

"Fourteen," said Richard promptly.

"Fifteen," corrected Thorne.

"You were ten when I saw you at the Bridgeton fair. Thorndyke's posters said so. That was four years ago."

"I had been ten on those posters for a long time."

"You think you are more than fourteen?" asked Dr. Caxton.

"Yes, sir. I'm sure I was at least twelve when I came here."

"That means you'll be sixteen this summer," said Will with a wink.

Richard's hand came down on the table with a force that rattled the dishes.

"She'll not be sixteen for another year, and I'll thank vou. Will, not to be putting ideas into her head. And you, Cricket, no fibbing about your age or I'll forbid you going to anv more parties."

Gone was the cozy peace of the supper table. Will pushed back his chair with maddening insouciance and had the impertinence to make deaf-and-dumb talk to Thorne as he left the room. Richard, black as a thundercloud, took his pipe to the chimney corner where he sulked in silence, Thorne alone seemed unperturbed by the brisk sortie. She pushed a chair to the hearth for the doctor, cleared the table, then took her place on a stool near Richard's feet. He looked down at her without speaking. Anger still rendered him inarticulate, but his brow cleared and he smoked in deep abstraction.

A tardy sense of professional duty reminded the doctor that he had a patient in the house.

"You were going to tell me about Judith," he said. "what happened to bring on this spell?"

Richard said to Thornc, "Isn't it time you were in bed?"

She looked at him with grave amusement. "Isn't it time you stopped treating me like a child?" To the doctor she explained, "Richard doesn't want to talk in front of me for fear of hurting my feelings. You see, Judith thinks I tried to strangle her."

The doctor said, "Great heavens!" and looked to Richard for confirmation.

"Judith had a bad scare this afternoon," said Richard. He related how they had found her and the strange tale Judith had told when she regained consciousness.

Thorne added, "I was the first person she saw when she opened her eyes. On the floor beside mc was a jumping rope."

The doctor had listened in silence to this point. Now he leaned forward, his rugged beak silhouetted against the firelight like a vigilant hawk's.

"Thorne, you're in a bad spot."

"I know it, Dr. Caxton." She was serious but calm. There was a womanly dignity in her tonight that was a far en' from the high-strung child whom Abigail had bullied. "Richard has only my word for it that I wasn't in the house when Judith screamed."

"Your word is all I need," said Richard, but the doctor waved him aside without taking his gaze from the child who this night, before his very eyes, had ceased to be a child.

"Judith hasn't complained of any disturbances around here for some time, has she, Thorne?"

"Not since the night she had that funny scare about the trundle bed,"

Richard, listening, felt a stab of relief that was near pain. She did not mention the ghostly hand which Lucius had seen at the window. That meant she had known nothing of it. That meant, to Richard, that she had not known of the doll hidden under the floor of the closet. She was innocent of everything, and he was freed from a dread that had gripped him ever since he learned of Otis Huse's discovery.

The doctor was saying to Thorne, "It might look to some people as though the witch that's been plaguing Judith had been quiet long enough. That she had to make Judith notice her again or be forgotten. Witchcs have to keep in the lime-light, don't they, Thorne?"

"I don't know anything about witches. I don't behevc in them."

"Then who do you think is frightening Richard's wife?"

"I don't know."

"You deny having anything to do with it yourself?"

"Yes, sir."

"Will you swear to that on the Bible?"

Richard started angrily to protest. The doctor hushed him with a look and reached for a Testament on a near-by table.

Thorne laid her hand on the book and said, "I swear that I'm telling the truth. I've had nothing to do with any of the strange things which Judith has seen." She withdrew her hand and added childishly, "Except the magic tricks on Miss Ann's birthday."

"And we believe you," said Richard. "No one accuses you."

"Except Judith," said Thorne.

"Judith is ill. When she's well again she'll be your friend, just as she's always been."

She looked at him strangely, as though seeking to learn whether he believed his own words.  He flushed and said hurriedly that she'd better be getting to bed. But his eyes followed her as she left the room. And he was no more aware of what he had revealed to Dr. Caxton than he was of the depth of devotion which she aroused in him.

He said, as though dismissing the whole matter, "Judith suffers from too much imagination. She's been bothered with her old throat trouble lately—I think she had another of those paroxysms—and, being already keyed up, fainted from sheer fright."

The doctor said, "Has it struck you, Richard, that she's having the same symptoms that Abigail had? When I saw her tonight I got a shock, she looked so damned much like your first wife."

Richard nodded gloomily. He, too, had noted the queer similarity.

"It's a plain case of hysteria," the doctor went on. ''She probably feels guilty about marrying you so soon after Abigail's death. I'd say the best treatment she could have would be—ahem!—a little more affection on your part."

When Richard went into his wife's room shortly before noon the next day he found her sitting in front of the dresser combing her hair. She greeted him normally.

"Why didn't you wake me sooner, dear?"

He tried to conceal his surprise. "You were sleeping so soundly, I thought you needed the rest." He looked at her anxiously. She was wearing a most becoming boudoir wrapper. "You look better this morning."

"Better? You talk as though I had been ill."

"Don't you remember Dr. Caxton coming last night?"

"Why, Richard, what are you talking about? I never felt better in my life."

He had the strangest feeling that she was dissembling; that she remembered the doctor's visit but preferred to ignore it.

"Well, you look fine this morning, Judith. I guess all you needed was a good night's rest." His eyes met hers in the mirror, and there was relief in his smile. The specter of another ordeal by invalidism had been removed.

"Richard, what has become of that friend of yours who used to come out from Woodridge—such an unusual person— a blacksmith, wasn't he?"

"You mean Doc Baird?"

"That's the one. He was so interesting. Why don't we have him out to supper sometime?"

Richard's astonishment was so great he could scarcely conceal it. Of all his acquaintances, the blacksmith was the one on whom Judith had most definitely turned thumbs down.

''I thought you didn't care for Doc Baird."

"Why, dear, whatever gave you such an idea? I like all your friends." She turned from the mirror brightly as she rose. "If you can get word to Mr. Baird, why not have him out tonight?"

"You really mean that?"

"Of course I mean it."

He was boyishly pleased. "I'm going in to Woodridge today. I'll bring Doc back with me."

"Good." She kissed him, her delicately scented hands framing his face. Her kisses always reduced him to helpless confusion. Last night he had faced stark fear for her sanity. A moment ago he had faced, almost as disturbingly, suspicion that she was not dealing honestly with him. But when she kissed him his mind was washed blank.

He muttered, "I have work to do," and tried to break away. But she held him, with her arms and her lips.

"The work can wait. Stay with me," she coaxed.

"There's the trip to town "

"You'll have time for that—afterward "

He put his hand behind him and closed the door.

"The trouble is," said Judith, "we've never been able to discuss these things because Richard always loses his temper," And she smiled indulgently at her husband, as at a retarded child.

They were sitting in the front room after supper, Judith and Richard and Doc Baird. Judith had some dainty needlework in her white hands. Richard, watching her, tried be-wilderedly to identify the gracious lady who had just spoken with the hagridden woman of the night before or the beguiling hussy who had lured him, a busy farmer, to bed in mid-morning.

"I thought, Mr. Baird, you might be able to explain to Richard how that trundle bed had been made to dance by the same principle by which you used to make tables move."

How the subject of the trundle bed had come up, Richard could not have said. It was weeks since the incident had been mentioned, and Judith's revival of the topic puzzled and disturbed him.

Doc Baird explained to her: "In table tipping, the hands must rest upon the table. Was anyone touching the bed when you saw it dance?"

"I couldn't tell," said Judith. ''A draft had blown out the candles."

Richard looked at his friend significantly. "The candles were burning all the while. No one but Judith saw the bed do anything."

"That's because you were all watching me," said Judith. She explained to the blacksmith, "I screamed, very foolishly, and distracted everyone's attention from the trick that was being performed."

"No trick was being performed," said Richard.

"Tricks were being performed all evening."

"But not with the trundle bed."

Voices of husband and wife were rising.

Doc Baird interrupted, "You're sure no one was touching the bed?"

"Thorne wasn't." Richard brought the name forth boldly, looking straight at Judith.

She asked, "How do you know whether or not she was touching it?"

"I had hold of her hands."

A bright flush drenched Judith's face. She bent low over her work.

Doc Baird said, "If no one was touching the bed, it couldn't have been animal magnetism. There has to be physical contact to establish the current." He spread his huge hands with justifiable pride. On this subject he was something of an authority.

"What I object to," said Richard, "is not a frank discussion of these disturbing experiences of Judith's, but the implication that Thorne is king when she says she has nothing to do with them."

The suggestion That Judith longed to make and dared not was unexpectedly offered by Doc Baird.

"Of course, there's one way to clear Thorne."

"What's that?"

"If she were sent awav for a while and Judith continued to be frightened in her absence, Thorne's innocence would be proved beyond doubt."

"And suppose Judith were not frightened in her absence," said Richard coldly, "should that be taken as proof of her guilt?"

Doc Baird did not remain long after that. When he rose to take his departure he was not asked to stay the night. He was offered, instead, the loan of a horse to ride back to town.

But his visit had far-reaching consequences.

"What do you think of Doc's suggestion?" Judith asked her husband as they were preparing for bed.

"What suggestion?" Richard was sitting in a low chair, taking off his boots.

"About sending Thorne away."

He sat up in shocked alertness. She went quickly on before he could speak:

"She could go to Kentucky and stay with your sister Annie. She's not doing well in school here. Perhaps she'd do better there."

He said, "You're talking like Abigail," and bent once more to his boots, so that he failed to see the fear that leaped to Judith's eyes. For a second she looked as she had the night before.

Then she continued: "I'm making a reasonable suggestion.

As Doc Baird said, with Thorne away we can determine whether or not it is she who is trying to frigliten me. These annoyances are no longer trivial, Richard. My experience yesterday might have been fatal. I think I've a right to know who made that attempt on my life."

At last he saw through her strategy. The evening's talk had been a base from which to launch a criminal charge against Thorne. Not in hysteria, but in cool-considered reason, Judith was accusing the girl of murderous assault.

Shocked, horrified, and angry as Judith had never seen him, he told her in unmistakable language that Thorne was not going anywhere. Timberley was her home. ''And I warn you right now, if she leaves this house, I leave it!"

His unexpected violence so alarmed Judith that had he stopped with those words he would have left her in a state of apprehension which might have insured peace for all time. But because his anger held the fury of the disciplined man driven beyond control, he had to go on, shouting in his rage:

"No attempt was made on your life. You had a fit of hysterics; the doctor said so. But if there's any more talk of Thorne's guilt in this matter I'll give people cause to have hysterics. And that goes for every last mother's son of you!"

As there was no one else present but Judith—and she was certainly no mother's son—the absurdity of this last threat struck her as humorous and restored her equanimity.

"You shouldn't make speeches in your underdrawers, darling. They distract the attention of your audience."

Without another word he picked up his boots and his breeches and marched downstairs to sleep in the alcove. Judith blew out her candle and climbed into bed. She was not troubled by his temper. It was more reassuring than his silence.

She would let him sweat a little as a matter of discipline. It would be all the better when he came back. It always was, after a quarrel.

What she never dreamed was that this time he would not come back.

CHAPTER 22

It was several days later that Richard came upon Thorne dragging a small hair trunk out of the back hall closet. He had been out in the fields all day and his boots were mired with spring mud, so that he entered the house through the kitchen and went straight to the back closet for dry shoes. There he found Thorne shoving and pushing at the trunk.

''What on earth are you doing, Cricket?"

"I thought it would be easier to pack this if I pushed it out into the hall."

"Who's packing it?"

"I am."

"Who for?"

"Myself. I'm going to boarding school."

Richard put an end to the trunk moving by sitting down on the trunk.

"Who said you were going to boarding school?"

"I said it." Thorne blew the dust off her hands with remarkable coolness, but she avoided Richard's eyes. "I've thought it over and I've decided that's what I want to do."

"Oh! You've thought it over, have you? And who helped you think it over?"

There was no reply to this. Thorne had stooped to examine a pile of old copybooks that lay upon the floor.

"What put the idea of going to boarding school in your head?"

"Well, you know I never have liked Timberley school. I've no head for numbers."

"And what do you expect to find at boarding school that you'll like better?"'

"Judith says I can study music and elocution and maybe Shakespeare."

"Oh, she does!"

"And you know yourself, Richard, I wasn't so stupid when you used to read us Shakespeare." She was sitting on the floor now, her lap piled full of copybooks.

"Look at me, Thorne."

She was too busy searching for a clean book among the castoffs to lift her eyes. "I thought I might keep a diary," she explained.

"Don't change the subject! Do you really want to go away? Do you think you'd be happier at boarding school than at home?"

She looked at him then seriously. "Do you think anyone in this house has been very happy lately?"

He said, "You're going away because you've got a silly notion it's the way to prove your innocence about these things that haye been frightening Judith. I think I know who gave you the idea."

Thorne said carefully, as though striving for perfect fairness, "Judith has always been a friend to me, Richard. We must remember that." Unconsciously she allied herself and Richard against the woman of whom they were speaking.

"Listen, Cricket. Your running away won't prove anything. It is quite conceivable that with you away nothing would happen to disturb her. I have you forgotten how she never saw the bricks when you could account for your whereabouts? Whoever or whatever is doing this—I still believe the motive is to drive you from home."

"You mean—Abigail?"

"I don't know—I honestly don't know. But there are people—living people—who have never liked you, Thorne. Take Otis Huse. He's always been unfair to you because he doesn't like me. You see, he expected to marry his cousin Abigail before I came along. He'd stop at nothing to hurt me, even the persecution of an innocent " Remembering his last talk with the hostile attorney, Richard's voice failed.

"I don't see how Mr. Huse could have played these tricks," said Thorne. "He hasn't even been around here, except that one time."

"I don't mean that I think he's the culprit." Richard frowned. He dared not put into words his fear regarding Otis Huse. "I'm just trying to show you that running away will be taken as an admission of guilt by those who would like to prove you guilty."

They argued this point pro and con. Thorne said finally, "Maybe you're right. I hadn't looked at it that way before."

"Certainly I'm right. So let's hear no more about going off to school. I can teach you college English here at home."

Satisfied that he had settled the question, Richard changed to dry shoes and went in search of his wife. He was thoroughly out of temper with what he considered female duplicity in going behind his back to engineer a course upon which he had emphatically set his veto less than a week ago.

He found the women in the dining room, Judith and his mother and Henry Schook's wife, who had come on an errand, they were trying out the new sewing machine, which Martha Schook had not yet seen.

"How much thread do you suppose it'll use in a year. Miss Ann?"

"If you don't do any sewing it won't use any thread," said Ann Tomlinson dryly. Then seeing her son glowering from the doorway, she asked quickly, "What's wanted, Richard?"

He said bluntly, "I'd like to speak to you and Judith alone. Mother."

This curt speech, so lacking in his usual courtesy, was the signal for Mrs. Schook's precipitate departure and subsequent report to her husband that Richard Tomlinson was a changed man and no doubt the Timberley witch was at him again. Which gossip was in general circulation within forty-eight hours.

Richard began, "Judith, why did you put Thorne in the notion of going away to boarding school?" and without waiting for a reply, "Mother, did you know of these plans?"

"Why, yes, Richard. We've been working for three days getting her ready to go. I thought you knew."

"How could I know? No one told me. How do I know what you women are doing when I'm out of the house?" He looked sternly at his wife.

Judith met his gaze steadily. "I've seen very little of you, Richard, since you moved downstairs."

"You've seen me at mealtimes."

"There are always so many things under discussion then, trivial matters slip my mind."

"Do you call Thorne's leaving home a trivial matter?"

She dropped her eyes to the petticoat she was hemming. He turned again to his mother.

"Surely you. Mother, could have found an opportunity to tell me what was going on."

"Well, son, you were in Woodridge the day we talked it over."

"Who talked it over?"

"Judith and I--and Will."

"Will!" Richard reddened angrily. "What business is it of Will's?"

Miss Ann took off her spectacles, which she wore on the end of her nose so that she could see over them. What she was about to say troubled her; not for its import, but for the effect it would have upon her son. She knew that it would make him very angry, and that was what troubled her. For it was news which Richard should welcome if he had only Thorne's welfare at heart.

"Your brother Will," she said, and looked at Richard as though the two of them were alone, "is going to be Thorne's husband one of these days."

If a charge of powder had exploded at his feet he could not have been more stunned. He looked at his mother like a man out of whom all sense had been knocked.

Then he muttered, "What are you talking about? She's not old enough to."

"Not now. But Will is satisfied to wait. He's also willing for her to have a year at boarding school. It's what she needs to help her finish growing up. It will give her a polish—like Judith's."

Something within him cried, "I don't want her to have a polish like Judith's!" But he could not speak. He was stricken dumb.

His mother went on: "Thorne's age has always been uncertain. She says she will be sixteen her next birthday. But it doesn't matter. In her position, the earlier she marries, the better. My mother married at fifteen and was very happy." Miss Ann put her glasses back on her nose and picked up her work with a sigh of relief for having put a dreaded chore behind her.

Richard still stood like a man turned to stone. All this had been discussed and decided behind his back. They had done this to Thorne—his Cricket—as though it were something which did not concern him.

"But she's mine—she's always been mine—nobody else ever cared anything about her except me " He was stammering like a schoolboy in his pain.

"She's a woman, my son. She's not a stray kitten you brought home in your pocket from the fair. She has a woman's life to live."

That was the charge of powder that had exploded in his brain. Thorne—with a woman's life to live—and his brother Will. . .

"I'm the head of this house. Why didn't Will come to me about this business?"

"Because," said Ann Tomlinson, "I'm Will's mother and the nearest thing to a mother that Thorne possesses. Neither of them are of age."

"And you gave your consent. Mother, to anything as preposterous as her betrothal to young Will?"

"I see nothing preposterous," said Ann with dignity, "in any girl's betrothing herself to a Tomlinson. I was proud to do it. And both your wives, Richard, seemed glad of the opportunity."

Judith lifted her eyes from her work and smiled agreement with her mother-in-law. "If there's anything preposterous in this match, it is that a Tomlinson should be willing to take a wife who has no name except the one he will give her."

"Nay"—Miss Ann spoke quickly, before the gathering storm in Richard's eyes—"that makes no difference to Will. He loves Thorne for herself. And I've no doubt she'll make him a good wife—when she grows up a little."

"And what about her?" said Richard. "Has anyone considered her happiness?"

"Will is a hard-working boy. A much better farmer than you, my son. He'll always provide for her."

As if happiness were compounded of those ingredients!

"I mean, has Thorne been consulted about this?"

"Oh yes. That's why she was willing to go away to school."

A great light broke upon Richard. Here was the explanation of Thorne's desire to leave home. It had nothing to do with witch pranks. It was the urge to separate herself from young Will.

A tremendous lightening of his heart was followed by a surge of wrath against his brother for forcing his attentions on a lonely child. Now he understood the purpose behind Will's kindness in taking Thorne to all the candy pulls and neighborhood frolics this winter. He, Richard, in his dumb complacency, had never given it a thought. But who could tell what had gone on in the snug, close warmth of straw-filled sleighs and Thorne, poor child, afraid to say anything about it? In his rage Richard longed to lay hands upon his brother.

He heard his mother say, "There's been a lot of unkind talk about Thorne. But it will all stop, once she's the wife of a Tomlinson. That's what you've always wanted, isn't it, Richard?"

Oh God, yes! But not this way. . . .

He said aloud, thickly, "She's not going to boarding school. I just talked to her. She's changed her mind."

''That's what Will was hoping she'd do," said his mother.

He went into the south bedroom to wash. Since the night of Doc Baird's visit he had slept in the alcove and used the adjoining room for dressing. He was not afraid to sleep in the bed he had once shared with Abigail, but he preferred the one over the trundle. He could not have told why.

The water in the porcelain pitcher was cold, but he never felt the chill. He was stripped to the waist and vigorously scrubbing when Judith knocked at the door. She had brought him a kettle of warm water from the kitchen.

He paused in his ablutions and waited silently while she tempered the icy water in the bowl, then plunged his hands into the grateful warmth of the heated suds without even a word of thanks. He hoped she would leave the room.

But it seemed she had something to say.

"Don't you think, Richard, that you owe your mother an apology?"

There were times when the schoolteacher in Judith was still evident.

He waited to dry his face on the towel she handed him. Then he replied: "I said nothing disrespectful to Mother. I said what I thought about members of this family who have gone behind my back to make arrangements which they knew I would not approve."

"I suppose that includes me."

His silence indicated that if the shoe were the right size she was privileged to try it on.

"There was no reason," said Judith, "why anyone should consider your approval necessary."

"Except that I had already stated my objections to Thorne's going away to school."

"Oh no. You had stated your objections to her going to Kentucky."

Richard looked at his wife in helpless exasperation. The Machiavellian quality of her mind was almost frightening.

"Kentucky—boarding school—what's the difference? I made it plain I didn't want her leaving home."

"That's what I told your mother."

"When?"

"When I talked to her about this marriage to Will."

"Oh! It was you who broached the subject to Mother."

"Yes."

"No doubt you also broached it to my brother."

"No. He came to me about it. He asked me to speak to Miss Ann."

"And why should he have picked you as a go-between?"

"Because he knew I would be sympathetic. He was afraid he might have trouble with you—and your mother. He knew I would help him."

"Since when have you and Will been such friends?"

"We're not. It's just that our interests coincide. I've known for some time that Will was getting ideas about Thorne. And he knows nothing would please me better than to see her married."

"But why?" Richard's anger found vent in the nolent friction of the rough towel against his chest. "Why all this rush to marry off a child who has hardly outgrown her dolls.

Thorne doesn't love Will. She doesn't love anyone but "

He stopped short in his furious toweling with a startled look.

"But you, Richard. That's what you were going to say, wasn't it?" Judith's voice was deadly cold. "Thorne doesn't love anyone but you, does she?"

He laid the towel on the washstand slowly and carefully, as though it were something which might break. He reached for his shirt and began putting it on, all without speaking a word.

"And you don't love anyone but Thorne, do you, Richard?"

"No." It seemed the most amazing circumstance of his life that he had never realized this simple truth before.

He buttoned his shirt and completed his toilet. Judith watched in silence as he combed his wet curly hair. There was nothing for either of them to say. The thing which had been between them all along, unacknowledged by the woman, unsuspected by the man, lay out in the open at last.

It was Richard who began to speak finally, as though striving to clarify for Judith something which only this moment had become clear to himself.

"I don't want you to misunderstand what I said just now'. About Thorne, I mean." There was touching earnestness in his voice, almost humble appeal. His anger had quite gone. "There's not a wicked thought or feeling in her heart, Judith. She's good and sweet. Her love for me is as pure as mine for my mother,"

"And is your feeling for her on the same high spiritual plane?" asked Judith bitterly.

Yesterday he would have answered without hesitation that it was. Now—since this business about his brother Will—he could answer nothing.

"How long have you felt this way about Thorne?"

How could he say? Always. Since that first day he saw her— at the fair. . . .

"Then Abigail was right when she said Thorne was the cause of her ill-health,"

"Judith—please " He looked at her imploringly, but

Judith went ruthlessly on: "It was really Thorne, then, who killed your first wife. If not by witchcraft, then by breaking her heart. It was Thorne, after all, who killed Abigail." She kept repeating this, as though there were some unction for herself in the thought.

"Why did you marry me, Richard? Why didn't you wait awhile and give your little peach time to mature? You needn't have waited long. She would have dropped in your hands at the first touch."

"Judith—don't talk like that! I tell you, I never thought of her that wav. She was a child—whom I loved as innocently as "

"As you loved your mother. I know. By the way, does she know?"

"Who—my mother?"

"No, stupid! The girl. Once you told her how you feel about her?"

He looked shocked and said. "No!" But almost instantly a curious look came into his eyes. Judith thought, "He doesn't have to tell her. She knows."

"Judith, you won't let this make any difference, will you?"

"Between you and me?"

He wasn't even thinking of that. That was all over anyway.

"In your attitude toward Thorne. She's innocent, Judith. She hasn't a thought that isn't a child's thought."

"I've seen her looking at you."

Suddenly Judith began to laugh softly, her whole body shaking with almost silent mirth.

"what are you laughing at, Judith?"

"At myself. What a fool I've been! It was for this that I planned and schemed and groveled and lied." There was something frightening in her strange, unseemly laughter. It mounted hysterically. "It was for this that I spent hour after hour in this sickening room with a whining invalid. It was for this that I "

She stopped as short as though a band had tightened about her throat, cutting off her breath. Her hands went to her neck, plucking at the velvet ribbon, but her body still shook with soundless mirth.

"Judith, stop it!"

Richard took her bv the shoulders and set her down in the low rocking chair. He did not like the look in her eyes. She had had that look a week ago, when it had been necessary to summon the doctor.

"Sit still while I get your smelling salts."

She looked at him mockingly. 'I'm not fainting, Richard. Not this time."

But he hurried away, alarmed and remorseful for what he had done.

Judith sat very still in the rocking chair. It was the same chair in which she had once sat by Abigail's bedside. She could almost see the emaciated figure propped up in bed, cutting out quilt pieces with a pair of sharp shears.

You dont believe me. You think I'm crazy. But you'll see. Someday.

The eerie voice was only a memory, but she could almost hear the clean sharp sound of the scissors as they cut through the pieces of silk.

She did hear it!

She sat up, tense, alert, listening.

The sound of scissors cutting briskly through fabric was quite distinct.

Cold seeped upward over Judith's body like the rising waters of an icy flood. This was the room in which she had seen the bricks fall. This was the room in which, only the week before, she herself had been seized in a weird attack.

She started to rise and leave the room.

She found she could not move from her chair.

Cold sweat poured from her body. The sound of scissors was very sharp and brisk now.

A voice called, "Miss Ann! Are you in there?" And Thorne appeared in the open hall door.

"Oh! I thought Miss Ann was in here." She seemed disconcerted at sight of Judith.

Judith looked at her in silence.

"What's the matter, Judith? Are you ill?"

"Stop it!" The words burst from Judith's stiff lips.

"Stop what?"

"The scissors."

"What scissors?"

"You know what scissors." Judith gripped the arms of her chair as though trying to rise. "Make them stop that noise."

Thorne stood very still, listening. "I don't hear anything."

To Judith, the sound of the scissors seemed amplified. She could hear them cut rapidly through a whole length of cloth. Then pause. Then start again. There was no one in sight but herself and Thorne. There were no scissors in sight at all.

She cried, "You're doing this. It's another of your tricks. But you can't frighten me to death as Abigail was frightened. Stop that noise before I scream for Richard."

"But I'm not doing anything," said Thorne.

"You're making that sound. I suppose ventriloquism is among your charlatan's talents. But you can't deceive me. You're dealing with an intelligent woman now, not a crazy fool."

Richard came back into the room with Judith's smelling bottle. He looked from one pale face to the other and asked, "What's the matter?"

Judith pointed to Thorne and said, "She's at it again, Richard."

Thorne said, "She says she hears scissors going. Do you hear anything?"

Richard listened, then shook his head. "Mother may be sewing in the next room."

"Your mother," said Judith, "is in the dining room."

Richard opened the door connecting with the front room and looked inside. There was no one in sight.

"I don't hear a thing," he said.

Judith's voice rose shrilly, accusing Thorne. Richard handed her the smelling bottle, but she thrust it aside. She continued to hear the scissors very clearly. She was beginning to locate

the sound now. Fear lifted her from her chair. She went over to the oaken chest and put her ear to the keyhole.

"It's coming from in here," she cried.

Richard drew his keys from his pocket, selecting, with maddening deliberation, the key to the chest. Judith snatched them impatiently from his hand. She unlocked the chest and raised the lid. Then she stood staring in fascinated horror at what her eyes beheld.

She saw Abigail's quilts neatly folded, one on top of the other, as they had been the last time she looked at them. But the beautiful coverlets, which had been the pride of the dead woman's heart, were now cut through every fold as though sharp shears had slashed them.

CHAPTER 23

Judith's screams brought Richard's mother hurrying down the hall.

"She did it, Richard! It's another of her witch tricks. She cut the quilts to pieces to frighten me, just as she made the doll to frighten Abigail. She made the doll that murdered your first wife, Richard. Remember that!"

Ann Tomlinson entered the room to find her son trying to quiet his distraught wife while she hurled invectives at Thorne.

"Look in the chest, Miss Ann! See what she's done to Abigail's quilts. And she made a sound like scissors to make me think I was going crazy."

Miss Ann went to the chest and bent over the quilts, examining them fold by fold. Richard said, "There's nothing wrong with the quilts, Mother. I've looked."

His mother gave him a significant look. Then, putting her arm around Judith, she said tindly, "You'd better come upstairs." Together they led her from the room.

When Judith was quiet, in drugged sleep upon her bed, Richard and his mother went back to the south bedroom and made a second and more thorough examination of the quilts. To the bottom of the pile they were found to be undamaged.

Richard said, "Judith worked herself into a state of hysteria over some fancied noise. Of course, when she looked at the quilts, she imagined she saw them cut." He told about the sound of scissors which Judith claimed to have heard before the chest was open.

His mother looked at him seriously. "Who made the sound of scissors?"

He flushed defensively. "If you mean Thorne, she's no ventriloquist."

"There's no denying, Richard, someone is trying to frighten your wife."

"Mother! Surely you are not turning against me."

"Against you, my son?"

"If you can believe this of Thorne, then you must believe that I am capable of shielding someone guilty of criminal mischief. What do you think of me. Mother?"

She looked into the troubled eyes of this best loved of all her children and said gravely, "I think I blame myself, Richard, for not warning you."

"About what?"

"About the haste of your second marriage. There is good reason, besides propriety', for not being in too great a hurry sometimes."

There was no mention of Thorne's name, but because there w-as understanding between them Richard said to his mother, "You don't take seriously what Judith said about Abigail's death, do you?"

"No. I'm sure Thorne made that doll innocently, to amuse the children. But I think you should talk to her about what happened this afternoon. After all, she used to be with a carnival show. No doubt she learned strange tricks with her voice as well as her hands."

It was late that night before he found a chance to talk with Thorne. There was another visit from the doctor, and Richard spent most of the evening by his wife's bedside. Dr. Caxton pronounced Judith's condition critical. It was his belief there was something preying upon her mind. Unless she got relief, she was heading for a mental collapse. Only the old doctor put it more bluntly.

"You know she could be going bugs, Richard."

But Richard had his own theory, as yet unacknowledged, regarding Judith's state.

When he finally came downstairs he found Thorne sitting by the kitchen fire, her head between her hands, like a weary little old woman. Such of the work had devolved upon her this evening.

"How's Judith?" She looked up quickly.

He told her what the doctor had said.

"Does she still blame me?"

He sat down heavily in the nearest chair and spread his hands to the fire. "I don't think she knows what she's saying."

"what does she mean by saying the doll murdered Abigail?"

"Abigail had a weak heart. And a superstitious fear of the doll. I suppose, if she had suddenly seen it, the shock might have been fatal."

"But she didn't see it. It was never found. Was it?"

He was silent, considering which course to take. And then he decided to be frank with her.

"The night Abigail died she claimed to have found the doll on her pillow with a tight string tied round its neck."

"I see. And everyone thinks I put it there."

"Certainly not. No one knows about it except Judith and me."

"Judith thinks I put it there."

"What Judith thinks is beside the point."

"What do you think?"

"I think Abigail imagined the whole thing. At least, that's what I thought at the time "

"And what do you think now?"

"It's possible that one of the children had it in his mother's room—or something " He sounded vague.

"What made you change your mind?"

"The doll was found the night Lucius and Otis Huse slept in the south room."

He told her everything then, and he watched her keenly while he talked. If there was any unacknowledged doubt of her innocence in his mind, it was expelled once and forever. It was impossible to believe that she had guilty knowledge of what he was telling her.

When he had finished she said, "I swear to you, Richard, I don't know how the doll got there. But if Abigail saw it, she probably died believing that I murdered her." They were both silent as this thought, in all its significance, gripped them. Then she asked, "Did Lucius think it was her hand he saw at the window?"

Richard said, "Lucius has always inclined to a belief in such things."

"What do you think?"

"I think Lucius had a nightmare. But if Abigail's spirit is roaming this house, I don't intend to let her intimidate me."

There was a sound in the covered passage. For a moment both Richard and Thorne felt a thrill of terror. Then they realized that one of Millie's traps must have caught a rat.

Thorne said, "It's not you she's trying to intimidate, it's me. She's still trying to drive me away, just as she did while living. And that's what seems so strange "

"What's strange?"

"That Abigail should mind about me, when it was Judith you married."

''But she knows it is you I love."

"Yes, I suppose she does."

They both spoke so matter-of-factly that they experienced a shock when they realized what they had said. Their eyes met gravely in silence while that clear statement of truth sank in.

Then Thorne asked curiously, "What do you mean by saying that you love me, Richard?"

"You know very well what I mean. You're dearer to me than anything else in life.'' He spoke gruffly, almost angrily, as though in protest that he could use nothing but words to tell her. "Abigail knew it before I did. That's why she was jealous. But you weren't to blame. I never loved Abigail."

She asked, in that same puzzled tone, "Why did you marry Judith?"

He colored violently, as though surprised in transgression.

"It was one of those things—that happen sometimes. But it wasn't love. I've never loved anyone but you."

She sighed, and her sigh was weighted with sadness, as though she were years older than he.

A lump swelled in his throat. He spoke thickly. "Thorne— you—what I heard this afternoon—about you and Will—it isn't true, is it?"

"It's true that he's asked Miss Ann for me."

"But you haven't "

"I'll do whatever Miss Ann thinks best."

"Good heavens! You can't "

"I'll have to marry someone, Richard, if I stay here."

"Not for years and years yet."

"Not so many years."

"Thorne, has he"—his voice was a tortured whisper—"has he ever touched you? Answer me! Those sleigh rides—has he ever "

She turned grave eyes upon him. "Is it any business of yours,

Richard, if he has?" And then, because she could see the wound she had given him, she added quickly, "He hasn't though. He's been very nice."

"Thorne, do you actually mean you could love my brother? Tell me the truth. If you think you could, then I'll never say another word upon the subject. But please be honest with me."

She was lost in thought for a moment. And then she spoke quietly, as though telling a thing long past.

"When your wife died, Richard, I was sorry. I couldn't understand why. But now I know it was because I was afraid you would marry Judith,"

He started to speak, but she went on: ''And then Judith went away and all that long summer I had you to myself. I decided my fears were imaginary. That summer was the first time I dreamed about what it would be like to love a man— the way Nancy talked about. And of course the man was you. I couldn't imagine loving anyone else. I'm afraid I never shall."

The thickness in his throat would not let him speak.

"And then that day we went to Terre Haute—and you told us Judith was going to be your wife " She paused, as though reliving the darkest hour of her short life.

"I wantcd to die. But I couldn't. I wanted to run away. But there was no place to go. And then your mother was so kind. I believe she understood. Weill's not bad either. Only sulky, sometimes. I was surprised-and rather flattered—when he asked me to marry him. I thought, 'If I marry Will I'll always have a home close to Richard.' So I said yes."

A sound like a sob came from the man beside her. There was nothing now for Richard to say.

But there was more for Thorne to say. "That was before I knew you loved me. Before I had told you how I felt about vou. Now that we have told each other it wouldn't be right for me to marry Will."

"It would be monstrous," muttered Richard.

She agreed. "It wouldn't be right for me to marry anyone around here. That's why I think I should go away."

To her surprise he said, "Yes. I think you should. And I'll go with you."

She looked at him incredulously. "You mean—you would?"

"I mean I wilL" He was suddenly alive with energy and purpose. "There's nothing to hold me here. The children have belonged to Mother since they were born. Will has always been the best farmer in the family. I'll never be missed."

Thorne said, "There's Judith."

He reddened. "We're nothing to each other any more."

She sat looking at him, lost in wonder and heartache unbearably sweet. She would have this for a memory always.

"But of course I can't let you do it," she said.

"What do you mean, you can't let me?"

"I won't let you ruin your life. That's what you'd do if you ran off from your wife and family with a girl who most people think is a witch. You'd be eternally damned by your neighbors, if not by God."

They argued heatedly. He pleaded with all the eloquence he possessed, but in vain. Thorne proved to have unsuspected rigidity of principle, on one subject at least. She was opposed to any course which would bring disgrace upon Richard.

In the end they compromised. She would remain at Timber-lev for the present, if for no other reason than to keep Richard from leaving his family. As for the pledge she had made to Will, time could take care of that.

CHAPTER 24

The torment of the bricks began again next day. Judith was seated at her dressing table in nightgown and wrapper, when she heard the unmistakable thud in the room below. She had slept late that morning. The rest of the family were already at breakfast. She hurried downstairs to investigate, and as she passed the open dining-room door she called excitedly, "It's begun again," and sped down the hall to the south bedroom to view the brick.

She saw it near the door, where the other bricks had fallen. The door was open, the windows raised; the fresh morning breeze swept through the room. She noted it was a half brick, as usual.

There was a general exodus from the dining room. Judith could hear the footsteps coming down the hall. She turned eagerly as young Will, the first to reach her, demanded, "Where's the brick?"

"There!" Judith pointed triumphantly. This time she had not left the spot until she had witnesses to corroborate what she had seen,

"Where?" said Will. "I don't see anything."

"There, by the door " Her voice broke with a gasp. In the split second in which she had removed her eyes from the brick to look at wall the thing was gone.

She was not frightened; she was furiously, frantically angry.

"It was there a moment ago! Look outside and you'll catch the imp who snatched it away from under my very nose."

Will, Jesse, and Richard's boys swarmed outdoors to search the premises, but neither the brick nor the brick thrower was in sight.

Judith said, ''Where's Thorne?"

Richard said quickly, "She went over to Jane's before breakfast."

His mother explained, "I sent her on an errand."

The rest of the family went back to their half-eaten breakfast.

Richard closed and locked the outer door of the bedroom and lowered all the windows.

"We'll settle this business," he said. "If a brick is thrown through that window now, it will have to smash the glass. And if it is sneaked out the door, it will have to go through the keyhole."

Judith shivered as with a chill. She went back upstairs in silence.

The others returned to their regular duties. The men went back to the work from which the breakfast bell had summoned them; the women, to their household tasks. Cousin Lutie Simms arrived to spend the day, but no one mentioned that Judith had seen another brick.

About an hour later they heard her scream.

Miss Ann and Cousin Lutie were in the kitchen with Millie. The black woman groaned, "Oh Lawdy, she's seein' things again!" Miss Ann hurried to the south room, Cousin Lutie at her heels.

They found Judith standing in the doorway. She still wore nothing but nightgown and wrapper; her long braids hung over her shoulders. She was staring at a spot on the floor.

"Judith, you shouldn't have got out of bed," said Miss Ann.

"I heard a whizzing sound—and then a thump." Judith's voice sank to a whisper as she looked at the closed window. "I knew what had happened—but I was afraid to come down —until it was too late."

"You didn't see a brick?" said Cousin Lutie in the tone of one who has been cheated.

Judith shook her head. "It was gone. But I heard the sound —a kind of whissht! like something rushing through the air."

Almost as she spoke Judith heard the sound she was trying to describe, then the familiar thud on the floor. She turned sharply—and saw a brick lying in the spot where the others had fallen.

There had been no crash of glass.

She pointed weakly to the brick. "There it is. Don't you see it?"

Cousin Lutie's face turned the color of cream. "I'm gettin' out."

Judith's cry was like the mew of a cat. She clung to her mother-in-law as she felt herself swooning. When she opened her eyes the brick was gone.

Miss Ann opened both windows and door That she might have air.

"Call Richard!" gasped Judith.

"He's already gone to the field."

"Ring the bell!"

"That will call all the men from their work." Miss Ann spoke practically to still the younger woman's rising hysteria.

"You think I'm going crazy."

"I think some noise outdoors sounds to you like falling bricks. And your imagination is doing the rest."

Judith seized on this eagerly, "Then now is the time to catch the person who is making that noise. Ring the bell!"

To quiet Judith, the bell was rung.

The ringing of the Timberley bell in the middle of the morning was a signal of such ominous import that not only did it bring the Tomlinson men to the house, but all the neighbors within hearing began gathering in expectation of fire, accident, or some other natural catastrophe. When it was learned that Tomlinson's wife had again reported bricks flying, the news spread like a prairie blaze. By noon half the countryside had assembled on the southeast lawn to watch for bricks.

"All I've got to say is, if Miss Judith seen bricks go through that window, then bricks have gone through it. A schoolteacher's too smart to be fooled," was the consensus of opinion, though one hardy individualist muttered, "If you ask me, the woman's gone daft," and at the chorus of protest added darkly, "There's others that think the same thing."

There was speculation as to the point from which the bricks were being thrown. No tree offered a vantage point from which that window could be bombarded. Yet all who claimed to hear bricks pass through the air (and it was remarkable how many people made this boast) insisted that they came from some point higher than the window, hurtling downward toward the house, lliose who claimed to have heard the whissbiug sound said it seemed to be above their heads. Henry Schook said, "If there was a windmill about fifty yards southeast, I'd say a feller on top if it might hit that window."

But there was no windmill southeast (as someone pointed out) nearer than Mr. Schook's own.

Another interesting circumstance was that people standing close to the house began claiming to hear the thud of falling bricks in the south room. Mitch Rucker—of Appomattox fame —had the temerity to venture so close to the window that he insisted he came very near being struck; in the head, this time, those who were bold enough to approach the open door reported that no bricks were to be seen inside the room, but this only gave rise to the fiction that the Tomlinsons were disposing of them as soon as they fell.

No one went so far as to claim, actually, to have seen a brick. But from time to time rumors circulated that Judith Tomlin-son had seen another one. These little flurries of excitement came with maddening irregularity. There might be an interval of quiet. People would decide that nothing was happening and they might as well go home, when a woman's thin scream within the house would cause the mass hysteria without to mount wildly. People would again fancy they heard the whistle. And no doubt they did, for half the crowd were now making the sound with their lips. It went on like that all day. Very little work was done in Timberley district that long bright spring day.

The excitement reached the crossroads store, and storekeeper and customers decamped and hurried off to the big white house on the knoll. The drummer, Jenkins, happened to be in the store at the time. He carried the news to Woodridge. By midafternoon half the idle citizenry of the town (and some not so idle) had joined the crowd about the house at Timberley. A covered wagon bearing the slogan California OR Bust turned in from the toll road on the mistaken assumption that the buggies, horses, and people milling around denoted a camping site for overland travelers.

It was remartable how calmly the Tomlinson family seemed to take the annoyance of having half the countryside camped on their lawn. The work within the house went on as though this were a normal day. Some busybody coming up to the well for a drink called to Miss Ann in the dining room and asked what she did with the bricks that fell inside the house. Her retort was quoted far and wide.

"No bricks have fallen in the house. If they had, I'd have used them to disperse this crowd."

Both the Tomlinson daughters and their husbands came over in answer to the bell summons. They remained to help their mother, for Millie was too demoralized and Cousin Lutie too excited to be of any use. Judith, soon after her husband's arrival, retired to her room. There were sharp words between Richard and his wife over the ringing of the bell.

"Why didn't you send one of the children for me, Judith? Then we wouldn't have had the whole neighborhood swarm-ing over here."

"I'm glad they've come. Now maybe we'll catch the person who's torturing me."

"No one's doing anything to you. Mother said the last time you saw a brick the window was closed. Why wasn't the glass pane smashed by the brick you heard pass through it?"

"I don't know. I'm not an expert in sleight of hand."

"So that's why you rang the bell. So that people would be here to see Thorne as she comes from Jane's. I believe you'd do anything, Judith, to incriminate Thorne. I believe these fits of hysteria have been staged for that purpose, just as Abigail's were. You're getting more like Abigail every day."

"Don't say that!" cried Judith, and clutched her throat.

"Then why do you hate Thorne, who's never done you an injury?"

"You can ask that, after what you told me yesterday?"

"She's not to blame. The fault—if there is a fault—is mine. She's innocent, Judith. She doesn't deserve to be hounded for something she had nothing to do with. She's good. You don't know how good she is."

Judith said meaningly, "Perhaps I do."

Suddenly he was enlightened. "It was you we heard in the passage last night. You were supposed to be in bed and you were listening. Have you no shame, Judith?"

"Under the circumstances, I had a right to listen. It is you, Richard, who should feel shame. Offering to run away with that little baggage. Don't think I couldn't see through her sly pretense of virtue. Of course she put you off. She knew I was hearing what she said."

"She didn't know. Neither of us guessed you'd stoop to eavesdropping."

"A wife must stoop to scotch the snake that has crawled into her bed."

"JUDITH!"

She could feel the impact of his shocked anger. But she had said the thing that had been beating in her brain since the night he left her room.

"You didn't think I knew, did you, Richard? How clever of you to pick a quarrel with me so you could move downstairs to the room she would have us believe is haunted. The room no one ever enters any more. You've been quite safe there, the two of you, haven't you, Richard?"

So great was his horror at this charge that he did not even think to deny that he had been sleeping in the isolated chamber.

"Judith! Do you know what you're saying, or are you really losing your mind?"

"You may as well admit the truth, Richard. I shall find means to prove it."

He tried to control himself. He tried to remember that this woman was his wife, whom he had vowed to cherish and protect. For otherwise he surely would have struck her in his rage.

"You are mad, Judith. Mad with jealousy, just as Abigail was. Only you are more jealous. Because you are smart. I shouldn't care to have your brains, Judith. Anyone capable of harboring such foul suspicions of an innocent girl would be capable of planning something equally monstrous."

"what do you mean?" Judith's face was suddenly ashen. There was no comeliness left in her at all. He wondered how he ever could have desired her.

He said softly, "Have you really seen bricks, Judith?"

"Don't try' to change the subject! Say what you mean, Richard. Don't stand there accusing me of unspeakable things."

"I'm not accusing you, Judith."

"You are, I can see it in your eyes. And it's false, do you hear? Lies! Lies! All lies! You can prove nothing against me.

He said quietly, "Go back to your bed, Judith. You and I have talked long enough."

Richard went out into the yard where his neighbors were fast gathering. He stood gazing toward the southeast, as was everyone else. But it was not the unseen thrower of bricks for whom he was looking. He was watching for Thorne.

She did not return to the house until midafternoon. Jane had asked her to mind the baby till she came back, and it was well after the noonday meal before Jane was free to leave Timberley and return to her own house.

"I wouldn't go home through the fields," she said as Thorne set forth. Kindhearted Jane had noted her brother's anxiety and guessed its source. So she advised Thorne to go round by the turnpike and the lane through the grove so that she would not be seen eoming from the southeast.

The covered wagon was camped in a little clearing in the grove. The family from Pennsylvania were making their supper. They had got permission, they explained when Thorne stopped to speak to them, from the people at the house. Camping privileges were never refused at Timberley.

Thorne laughed at the banner California or Bust. The wayfarers were an amusing family, curiously unlike the country jakes they appeared to be. There was something gay and dashing about them all, from father and mother down to the youngest child. A debonair, happy-go-lucky bohemian-ism that touched a nostalgic chord. When Thorne inquired what they expected to raise in California, the father—a dapper, youngish fellow in spite of blue jeans and graying hair—winked at his wife and said, "Vegetables," and the whole family laughed as though he had cracked some sort of joke.

Suddenly Thorne cried, ''You're show people!"

"How'd you guess?"

''I used to be with a show myself."

After that they were no longer strangers.

"The best show I've seen in many a day is going on right now up at that house yonder," said the man. "They tell me some fellow with an aim like a knife thrower is hurling bricks through a window no bigger'n that"—he spread his hands to indicate—"and they say he's so far off he can't even be seen, that fellow's wasting his talent on a farm, lie ought to join up with us. Out in California performers get gold nuggets big as walnuts tossed on the stage when their act makes a hit. And anything goes, even second-rate stuff. That brick thrower would panic 'em."

"Did you see any bricks go through the widndow?" asked Thorne.

"No. There's such a crowd you can't see anything. But I got close to a fellow that claimed he heard one go over his head. Said it might' near hit him. But they tell me nobody's been struck yet."

"And no one has seen the brick thrower?" Thorne repeated.

"No, little lady, seems they haven't. I stuck around awhile, trying to find out. Then I got hungry and came back to the wagon. If you know who's doing it, I wish you'd tell him to get in touch with me. I believe I could make him a proposition that'd interest him."

Thorne said, "No one's doing it. There aren't any bricks."

When she had gone the mother of the migrant troupe said to her husband, "She was a pretty little thing, wasn't she?"

The man said with a knowing look, "I didn't tell all I heard up there. Brick throwin' ain't the only funny business, according to the talk."

"What kind of talk?"

"Witches, ghosts, goblins, all sorts of queeraess. And ugly tales about a half-grown girl who used to make flowers bloom in mid-air and pull rabbits out of hats."

The woman's mouth dropped open. "Do you suppose "

"She said she had been with a show."

"Poor child!" The kindly woman sighed and shook her head. "She'd better get back with show people, then, before these crazy farmers burn her for a witch."

The man said wistfully, "I sure could use her in the act."

Judith sat by the window in her room, her knitting in her hands. She saw Thorne enter the house and went to the top of the stairs and called to her.

"Come up here, Thorne. I want to talk to you."

"In a minute. Soon as I get something to eat." Thorne had been too busy with Jane's baby to make herself any dinner.

When she appeared in Judith's doorway she had a slice of bread and butter in one hand and an apple, rosy as her cheeks, in the other. Her hair was flying, her dress was soiled, and there was a rent in her stocking where she had climbed a fence. Never had she looked more like a heedless gypsy.

''Did you want something, Judith?" Her mouth was so full she could barely articulate.

To an onlooker it would have seemed the height of absurdity that the little hoyden could possibly be an object of jealousy to the carefully groomed woman plying the knitting needles. Yet the hatred in Judith's heart was so vehement that it gave her strength such as she had not felt since her ill-health began. No emotion she had ever experienced, not even her passion for Richard, was so exhilarating as was this violent anger against Thorne. It seemed to justify everything she had done, everything she purposed to do. It even made her forget for the moment the pain which now almost ceaselessly clutched at her throat.

"Are you feeling ill again, Judith?''

'I'm feeling quite well, thank you."

"If there's anything I can do for you "

"There's something you can do for all of us, Thorne. That's what I want to talk to you about." Judith's voice was gentle, holding no threat of what was coming.

"What do you mean?" asked Thorne.

"I should think it might have occurred to youwithout my suggestion. After last night."

"what do you know about last night?"

"I know all about last night. Richard has told me. As of course you would have known he'd do had you been a little older. Men always tell their wives, Thorne. That's what girls of a certain type never seem to understand."

"But " Thorne was bewildered. It was Richard's privilege, perhaps his duty, to repeat to his wife the conversation he had had with Thorne by the kitchen fire. Though in Thorne's code of ethics such behavior was not only unnecessary but extremely silly. Still, if Richard had confessed to Judith that he had asked Thorne to go away with him, then he must also have told her that Thorne had refused.

"Did he tell you everything, Judith?"

"Everything."

"On both sides?"

"On both sides."

Thorne considered this a moment. "Well, maybe it's better that he did. At least you know why I'm staying on here. I had decided to run away. Until I found that Richard planned to go with me."

Judith lifted her eyes from the sock she was knitting.

"Don't lie, please. I'll grant it's revolting to think of a girl so young trying to entice a married man from his wife and children under his own mother's roof—though with your background such morals are to be expected—but please don't lie. It's quite useless."

Thorne's astonishment at hearing herself thus branded as a home wrecker was so great that she stood speechless, staring at the woman who was damning her so very genteelly.

"I've expected something like this for a long while," Judith went on. "I've watched you throwing yourself at Richard in a way that—well, if you hadn't been so very young I should have ordered you out of the house. But I knew how friendless you were and how kind my husband is, even to dumb animals. We've talked it over many times. He always said that turning you out was like abandoning a homeless dog. But after last night he realized you were not a fit person to live in the same house with his wife and mother. So he asked me to tell you that you must leave."

Judith's eyes dropped to the work in her hands. Thorne's remained fixed upon the woman who had just uttered this outrageous falsehood. That it was a falsehood, Thorne never doubted for a second. Her faith in Richard was unshakable.

Yet Judith was Richard's wife, just as Abigail had been his wife. And Judith had succeeded to Abigail's jealousy as she had succeeded to her husband. Richard was bound until death to this woman, for there was no tolerance for divorce in the strict creed of the Tomlinsons. So long as Thorne remained at Timberley, Judith would make Richard's life a torment, as Abigail had done.

"I'll go, Judith. But not for the reason you ask. I don't know what Richard said to you. You must have misunderstood him. For he would never have lied about me. And it would have been a shameful lie if he had told you I asked him to go away with me. I love him far too much to let him do a thing that would bring disgrace on himself."

"Oh! You admit that you love him."

"Of course I do. I've never pretended anything else, I've always loved him; I always shall. But it's not true that I tried to take him from you. It was to keep him from leaving Timberley that I promised to stay here and go on as we had before."

"What do you mean—go on as youhad before?"

"Nothing—I meant nothing, Judith Don't, please!"

Thorne backed away in sudden fear, for Judith had risen, the long steel knitting needle clutched like a dagger in her hand, and was coming closer and closer as Thorne retreated toward the door,

"Tell me what you promised to go on doing that you had done before!" The terrible gasping voice hissed the words in Thorne's face while the point of the needle pressed her breast.

But Thorne was too frightened to speak. All her old fear of Abigail came upon her, only now it was fear of Judith and ten times more potent. For Abigail, at her worst, had threatened only banishment. But Judith, Thorne suddenly realized, would be capable of doing an adversary to death.

With a smothered scream she broke from Judith's clutch and fled in terror from the room, from the house, and down the long slope to the grove.

Judith, watching from her window, saw her disappearing beneath the canvas top of a covered wagon.

As Richard came up to the house at dusk he had to stop in the lane to let a wagon pass. He smiled at the ludicrous banner announcing its destination and waved farewell to the driver, the only occupant in sight. The rest of the migrant family was under cover, and as the lumbering vehicle pulled out on the turnpike, the popular ditty of the road— slightly revised—floated back on the evening breeze:

"I come from Pennsyvania, my banjo on my knee, I'm goin' to California, my true love for to see: Oh Susanna, oh don't you cry for me . . ,"

CHAPTER 25

There was a first and second supper table at Timberley that evening, for among the people who had come out from Woodridge were a number to whom the Tomlinson hospitality was a matter of course. John Barclay, Dr. Caxton, Doc Baird, and that loquacious war veteran, Mitch Rucker, were among those who put their legs under the long table that night. Mitch declared he had not seen anything since Bull Run to equal the day's excitement.

"I've a standing offer of five hundred dollars to anybody who'll explain the bricks your wife saw, Richard. Or produce the ones we heard whiz through the air. I don't expect to be taken up." Which was just as well, since Mitch hadn't five hundred dollars to his name.

They were halfway through the meal before Richard noticed Thorne's absence. The children were being served in the kitchen, and he supposed she was with them.

But when the company adjourned to the front room after supper and Thorne still did not put in an appearance, Richard drew his mother aside and asked her to send Thorne in.

"I don't want her hidden away. Mother, It looks as though we thought her guilty of something."

"No one's hiding her away, son. She's not here."

"Where is she?"

"She hasn't come back from Jane's yet."

"Then I'll go for her. It's too late for her to come home alone."

"You have company, Richard. Your place is here. Jane won't send the child home alone, they'll probably keep her all night."

The company stayed late. There was much talk. Because there was not a person present who hadn't some anecdote or theory to add to the rapidly growing legend of the brick throwing.

Dr. Caxton said, "If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed an entire community could so hypnotize itself as to credit what did not exist. Half the people who were here today will tell their grandchildren, years hence, about seeing bricks from nowhere crash through the Tomlinsons' window."

Miss Ann glanced uneasily at her daughter-in-law. Judith had appeared at the supper table, looking much as usual and apparently in better spirits than she had been all day. Ann Tomlinson hoped this talk would not disturb her,

"Otis Huse was out there this afternoon," she said, to change the subject. "I expected him to come up to the house for supper. But he drove away."

This turned the talk on Huse and his long-standing grudge against Richard. It was agreed that Huse would stop at nothing to embarrass the man of whom he had always been jealous. But here, even the lawyer's disparagers stopped and went no farther. No one who had mingled with the excited mob that afternoon could accuse Otis Huse of having assembled it.

The strangest experience of the day was reported by John Barclay and Doc Baird.

"Doc and I went close to the house once," said the schoolmaster. "Doc stood in front of the window. I stood not far from the door. We determined to stand there until somebody fancied he heard another brick coming."

Richard grinned. He seemed determined to treat the whole thing lightly. "Weren't you afraid you might be struck?"

The blacksmith said gravely, "I wish I had been."

"Why?"

"That would have proved that bricks were being thrown," said Doc, and glanced significantly at Judith.

An uncomfortable silence fell upon the group.

"Well," said Richard after a pause, "I suppose when no trick came "

A voice said coldly, "A brick did come." It was the first time Judith had spoken. She looked straight at the schoolmaster. "Tell them, Mr. Barclay."

Barclay, visibly embarrassed, took up the tale. "Somebody in the crowd called out that he heard a brick coming. Someone else cried that he heard it fall. A few minutes later we heard a muffled scream within the house. Doc and I rushed inside and found Miss Judith. She was staring at—a spot on the floor."

Judith said in the same cold voice, "Of course either of you could have removed the brick."

"We could have," said John Barclay, "but we didn't."

"Because," said Doc, "there was no brick to remove."

Judith's hands gripped the arms of her chair to still their trembhng. "You accuse me of lying?"

"We know you're not lying," said the blacksmith solemnly. "You saw something on the floor that frightened you speechless. We saw nothing at all. That's why I said I wished I had been struck by a brick."

Richard said matter-of-factly, "what Juditli saw on the floor was a spot of sunshine," and put an end to ghostly speculation.

But the pallor of Judith's face caused Dr. Caxton to look at her sharply. She laughed to show how little the talk affected her. But there was a shrillness in her laughter that the doctor did not like. lie lingered a moment when the other men had departed.

"You don't look so good tonight. Miss Judith. Maybe I'd better leave you a dose of calomel. Spring of the year makes people bilious."

"If you leave me anything, Doctor, let it be some more of that sedative."

"Still having trouble sleeping?"

"Now and then,"

"Well, go light on this." He handed her a bottle from the black bag without which he never traveled. "You can't take this like you took that other stuff. Enough of this will put you to sleep permanently."

Judith smiled. "You can trust me to use it in the right proportions."

When the doctor had gone Judith said to her husband, 'Your friends tried their best to make me believe I've been seeing supernatural manifestations. It's what might be expected from that ignorant blacksmith. But I'm surprised at a man of John Barclay's intelligence."

Richard's reply was smothered in a yawn. He had decided in his own mind that Judith was malingering and he was no longer concerned with what she saw or claimed to see. He was troubled and uneasy because Thorne had stayed at Jane's. He was afraid something had been said to hurt her feelings, but he did not like to start another argument with his wife. So he banked the fire and mumbled good night and waited for Judith to go upstairs so that he could go to bed in the alcove. The rest of the family had retired.

But Judith had something on her mind. She was burning to know if he had missed Thorne.

"By the way," she said casually, "where was Thorne this evening?"

"She's spending the night at Jane's."

"Oh. I see." She stood turning the bottle of sedative in her hands.

"Don't take too much of that stuff, Judith."

"Why?"

"I heard what Dr. Caxton told you."

"Would  you care, Richard, if I took too much?"

He looked at her sharply; alarmed, at first, then exasperated.

"I think you'd better give it to me."

He reached for the bottle. She surrendered it obediently, like a child. She was in a queer mood tonight.

He said, "I'll bring this up to you if you need it. But try to sleep without it tonight." He yawned elaborately. "Better get to bed now. We're both tired and sleepy."

But she still lingered. "Richard "

"Yes?"

"Surely you're not sleeping down here tonight."

"Why not? Tm not afraid of your bricks."

"I don't mean that."

She came close to him; her perfumed hands touched his face.

"Darling, haven't you sulked long enough? Come back upstairs to our room and stop behaving like a bad little boy."

The exquisite scent which had once stirred his senses no longer moved him. There was nothing left of their relationship except a strange feeling of guilt. Why this should be when she was his wife, he did not try to understand. But he knew now that always there had been between them the dark thrill of something illicit.

"I'll sleep down here, Judith."

The gentleness of his tone misled her.

"I'll stay with you then," she whispered.

"No." He spoke with harsh finality, so that she drew away from him. "There is too much that is wrong between us, Judith."

"You mean " she began, then stopped. She would not bring Thorne's name into this. All that was gone now.

"I don't quite know what I mean, Judith. There's something dark and shameful between us that I don't understand. Sometimes I think it's because we married too soon after Abigail died. And again I think it came from that terrible feeling of relief I had when she was gone. But—whatever the cause—I've always had a feeling of guilt with you."

"That's your Puritan conscience convicting you of sin for finding pleasure in love."

"No, you're wrong. I don't hold love a sin, except when sinners indulge in it."

"And you call us sinners, with our double-ring marriage ceremony?"

"I don't mean that " He made a futile gesture. It was something he could not explain.

"I have to think things out, Judith. If you don't mind, I'll say good night."

She took her candle and went up the stairs alone.

It was past midnight when Richard awoke from a sound sleep. For a moment he thought he was still dreaming, for he seemed to be in a theater watching Charlotte Cushman come down the stairs in the sleepwalking scene from Macbeth.

She wore a trailing robe and held a candle high above her head, and her hair fell in long braids on either side of her breasts. She looked pale and distraught, and in his half-slumbering state Riehard acknowledged that she was a marvelous aetress. She did not look haunted. She was haunted.

Then he started into complete wakefulness and realized that he was looking through his own open door and that the woman with the taper, descending the stairs, was Judith.

He sat up and reached for a night robe, but he did not go to her. If she were walking in her sleep it was dangerous to waken her. He waited till she reached the foot of the stairs and started down the hall. Then he followed her.

She went straight to the south bedroom. Carefully she set her candle on the table. Then she opened the closet door and dropped to her knees. He saw her thrust her hand into the hole under the floor. When she drew it forth, full of nothing but cobwebs, her eyes were wide with terror. But they were alert and conscious. She was not asleep.

"If you're looking for the doll, Judith, it's not there."

She turned in the direction of his voice, and he saw that she was utterly undone.

"Otis Huse found the doll the night he slept here."

She rose to her feet, swaying dizzily, and began brushing the dust from her hands. She offered no explanation for what she had been doing.

Richard went on: ''Huse guessed that the doll had been used to kill Abigail. I had to tell him that it was I who hid it here—in order to protect Thorne."

She seemed not to be listening. She seemed only intent on getting the cobwebs off her hands.

"But now I know that it was you, Judith, who hid the doll. You tied the string round its neck and put it on Abigail's bed, hoping it would frighten her to death. You planned it, step by step, how she might die from fear. And you seized on a child's harmless toy to feed her superstitious terror. When you read her those books about witchcraft you had the doll even then and knew how you were going to use it. Didn't you, Judith?" His low, relentless voice was like a prodding hand, pushing her to the very brink.

"And when you had frightened her into a heart attack you hid the doll where you thought no one would ever find it. Because there was no one to see you, except the woman who was dying. You forgot about her, didn't you?"

She left off brushing her hands and began plucking at her throat.

"Maybe you have seen phantom bricks, Judith, and heard phantom clocks. Maybe that is why you were looking for the doll tonight. Because you suddenly recalled that only Abigail knew where you had put it."

She no longer heard him. She had crumpled in a senseless heap. He lifted her in his arms and carried her up to her room.

It was noon the next day before it was discovered that Thorne was not at Mitchell's. Alec came over to see how Judith was, and when Miss Ann inquired about Thorne he said that she had not been at their house since the day before.

The dinner bell had already rung, and the Tomlinson men could be seen approaching the house. Miss Ann said, "Don't say anything about this to Richard. Not till we've located Thorne."

But at first sight of his brother-in-law Richard demanded, "How much longer are you and Jane going to keep Thorne?" Then, catching a glance between his mother and Alec, "She is at your house, isn't she?"

"Why—no, Richard. She's not."

"Didn't she stay there last night?"

"No."

"And you waited till noon today to tell us?"

"Well, great Scott! I didn't know she was lost."

The word was like an alarm bell. Richard's face drained of color.

Miss Ann said quicWy, "She's not lost."

"Mother! You told me "

"Now keep cool, Richard. I took for granted when she didn't come home that she was spending the night with Jane. But I suppose she stayed with Nancy Turner instead. Will, get your horse and ride over to your sister Kate's and bring Thorne home." Ann spoke with as much certainty as though Thorne's presence at Turner's was an established fact.

"I'll go myself," said Richard, and before his younger brother could marshal his slower faculties he was out of the house and on his way to the barn. A few minutes later he could be seen galloping across the open field. The Turner farm was less than a mile as the crow flies. It was three miles by the road.

Judith stood by the window and watched her husband ride away. Young Will, looking unusually glum, sat down and began eating his dinner. Perhaps he resented his brother's usurpation of his own rights of primary concern for Thorne's safety. No one—not even their mother—had given a thought to Will's feelings. They had taken for granted that Richard was the one on whom the blow had fallen.

"Sit down. Alec, and eat with us," said Miss Ann. "Come, Judith. No use waiting for Richard. He won't be back till he finds Thorne."

Alarm leaped to Judith's eyes, as though this were a turn she had not foreseen. Miss Ann, misinterpreting, added quickly, "She's around the neighborhood somewhere."

The meal was eaten in almost unbroken silence. A rare occurrence at the Tomlinson board. A strange foreboding stilled the usually lively tongues. Even the children were quiet. Everyone seemed waiting for Richard's return.

He rode up on a sweating horse just as they rose from the table. One look at his face and they guessed his news.

"Wasn't she there?" asked Will quickly.

"Hasn't been there," said Richard. "Hasn't been seen by any of the Turners."

Dark color rose in Will's cheeks, as though something in his brother's look angered him.

He said shortly, "I'll go over to Cousin Lutie's."

Jesse Moffat volunteered to go over to Henry Schook's.

Alec Mitchell said, "The thing for us to do is to take different directions. There are four of us. And at each house we come to there'll be others to join us. We can comb the whole district before dark."

For the first time the gravity of the situation was put into words. ITiorne might not be at anyone's house. She might be lying behind some hedgerow, or in some dark thicket of the woods. There had been a motley crowd at Timberley the day before. It had been afternoon when the young girl had set out to walk home alone from Jane's.

Alec's plan was put into action. Richard rode off again, not waiting for food, taking the dirt road to the south. As soon as horses could be saddled the other three men rode north and east and west, following by-lanes and fence rows as well as beaten paths, missing not a house. And at each house there was someone ready to join the search. By nightfall Timberley district had been combed as with a fine-toothed comb.

But no trace of Thorne was found.

No one could even remember seeing her after she left Jane's house, though nearly every person in the countyside had been to Tomlinson's the day before.

"No, sir, never saw Thorne while I was there," was the report on all sides. Frequently followed by, "I remarked about it. 'Cause there had been talk a while back that all the funny stuff Miss Judith had been seein' was nothin' but Thorne's magic tricks. But I says to myself, 'I reckon this clears the girl of witch doin's. Richard's wife is seein' things this time and Thorne ain't even here.'

No, Thorne had not been seen by anyone the day before.

Only when it became too dark to see did the men return to the house. And then there were only three.

Miss Ann asked sharply, "Where's Richard?"

The men replied that they had not seen him. He would be in soon, no doubt.

But Richard did not come.

Ann Tomlinson, no longer gallantly pretending, prayed silently:

"O God, bring him home. O dear God, don't let him be hurt too much." And she remembered a time long ago when his dog had been lost and he had stayed out half the night— a little seven-year-old lad—searching the dark woods for his pet, until she and his father had had to search for him.

To his mother he was still that little boy searching for something he had lost.

Will Tomlinson, eating his supper, listening for his brother's step, wondered jealously why Richard should search later than he. And the anger he had felt at noon rose again within him. Then, remembering the look he had seen in his brother's eyes, he knew that he would never be able to grieve for Thorne as Richard would grieve. It would have been a terrible mistake for him to have married her when Richard loved her so. It was better, perhaps, that this thing had happened.

Judith's thoughts, too, were on that lonely rider searching the woods. How long would he look for the girl before relinquishing hope? And afterward—what then? Would he turn to his wife for consolation? Last night's discovery she could easily turn to her own account, as proof of her overwhelming desire for him. But would Thorne, absent, prove an even sharper barrier than Thorne, present, had been?

Supper was put by. Chores were done. Bedtime came, but no one went upstairs. At eleven o'clock Ann Tomlinson said to her younger son, "I think you should go look for your brother."

Will promptly rose, as though the thought were already in his mind.

Jesse Moffat said, "I'd better go with you."

Fresh fear struck Judith, sharper than any she had known.

''Why should you look for Richard? Isn't he old enough to come home by himself?"

Will said, "There's no telling what he might do—if he found what he feared to find."

A scream rose in Judith's throat, but her clutching hand held it back. The thought of Richard . . .

"It is you who should jump in the millpond." She laughed to cover the scream. "Thorne is your loss, not Richard's."

"Thorne belongs to Richard," said young Will. And no one contradicted him.

They did not search for Richard after all. Before the men got started he came in, looking so tired and spent and utterly hopeless that those who sprang up eagerly at his step stopped in consternation at sight of his face.

"Richard! Where have you been?" cried his mother.

It was as they had feared. He had been dragging the mill-pond. He and Ralph Tatum had worked by the light of lanterns when it got too dark to see. They had found nothing.

But he had come home. The thing they dreaded had not happened.

He sat in his chair, his head between his hands, refusing the food his mother set before him. He did not seem to hear when the other men tried to paint as hopeful a picture as possible.

"No news is good news, Richard. Thorne has come to no harm or we should have found her. Remember, there were people here yesterday from as far away as Bridgeton. She must have gone home with someone."

The words held false comfort. Thorne never went anywhere without permission.

When Alec had gone home Will said, "There's nothing more we can do tonight. I'm going to bed." He took his candle and started for the stairs.

Richard's voice halted him.

"Don't you care?"

Will stopped with his foot on the step. "You mean about finding Thorne?"

"What else matters?"

"Why—a number of things," said Will. "The plowing of the south field matters. There's corn to be planted. If we don't get to bed pretty soon we won't want to get up in the morning." He went on up the stairs.

Judith had said nothing. She had sat in silence, watching her husband sunk in grief—and something worse than grief —the torture of the unknown. She wondered how far she dared go in putting an end to his uncertainty. He could not go on like this. He would be ill.

So when the others had retired she said to him, "Has it occurred to you that Thorne might have gone away of her own volition?"

"You mean run off? Never!"

"Not run off. Just decide to leave. She's often talked of it."

"She'd never go without letting me know. She promised."

"Not if she were suddenly offered a chance?"

Richard looked at his wife suspiciously. "What do you know?"

"Nothing," said Judith smoothly, "except what everyone knows: that Thorne left Jane's house yesterday and started for home. And what was going on here? An excited mob was milling about the house. I daresay there was plenty of talk circulating about Thorne. Suppose—this is just conjecture— someone on the outskirts of the crowd offered her a chance to escape from what was becoming an intolerable situation?"

"And who," said Richard skeptically, "could have offered such a chance?"

"Did you notice a covered wagon in the grove yesterday?"

For a moment every pulse in his body seemed to stop. He recalled the wagon which had passed him at dusk in the lane. Could Thorne have been beneath that canvas top—and his heart not have told him?

He said, "She would never go off with a Pennsylvania farmer."

"He wasn't a farmer," said Judith. "He was a traveling showman."

"How do you know?"

"He came up to the house for water. I talked to him."

"Wliy? You're not usually so interested in vagrants."

The sarcasm was ignored.

"When Thorne came from Jane's," said Judith, "she must have passed this wagon."

"Not if she came across the fields."

"She didn't come across the fields. She came by the turnpike and through the grove."

"How do you know?"

Judith's hand went to her throat. She had talked too much.

"You seem to be pretty well informed about Thorne's movements," said Richard. "Why haven't you told this before?"

"Because it's only a suspicion. I don't know anything."

"You know she came through the grove, don't you?"

"Yes. I know that much. But that's all."

"I don't believe you, Judith. If you'd withhold that knowledge, when eveyone else was searching, you'd withhold more. What else do you know?"

"Nothing. I saw Thorne from my window yesterday when she came home. She came through the grove—to avoid the crowd, I suppose—and ran into the house. I called to her. She said she was getting something to eat. A little later she ran out again and I saw her racing toward that wagon. That's the last time I saw her. And that's the truth, Richard. I swear it."

He looked at her with implacable coldness.

"Why have you waited twenty-four hours to tell this?"

"I never thought of it at first. Then it seemed such a bare possibility that I kept still rather than delay your search. After all, the most important thing was to make sure she had not suffered foul play in the woods. But now that you have failed to find any trace of her, I really believe she left of her own accord with those people in the wagon. They were her kind of people, Richard. That banner— California or Bust— would have caught her eye." Judith smiled as though the whole thing were working out in the happiest possible manner.

"I've always felt, Richard, that if Thorne were left to her own devices she would do the right thing. And of course the right thing was for her to go back to her own environment. So instead of wearing ourselves out with searching for the child, let's say our pravers tonight with special gratitude for the way God has worked things out for the good of all concerned."

Richard rose to his feet, and the impact of his words seemed the greater coming from that tall, stern height.

"Don't blame God, Judith, for your own conniving."

"You mean you don't believe me?"

"I believe what you've told is true. Only you haven't told it all. What happened between the time you called to Thorne and she left the house? What did you say to her, Judith? Don't answer! It would only be to lie. After what I learned about you last night, I know that you would stop at nothing to gain your purpose. You said something to Thorne that made her feel it was necessary for her to leave Timberley. Didn't you, Judith?"

Her face was white with the knowledge of defeat. She had lost everything now. She had nothing more to lose—or so she thought.

"And what if I did? Was I to stand silently by and see my home wrecked without lifting a finger?"

"Thank you for telling me, Judith." He almost smiled.

"Telling you what?"

"All I wanted to know. Now that I know why Thorne left, I believe the rest of your story is true. Those people were headed West, weren't they? And they pulled out yesterday evening. They're only a day's journey from here. A good fast horse could overtake them by tomorrow night."

"You mean you'd follow them?"

Fool, fool that she'd been to have spoken so sooni She should have waited a week at least.

"It will do you no good, Richard. It will only make you a laughingstock. After what I said to Thorne she'll never come back."

"In that case there'll be one more traveler bound for California."

"You're mad!"

"I was never so sane in my life."

"You'd leave your wife—your mother—your children—for that "

"Don't say it, Judith! I warn you."

"Can you imagine what people will say?"

"It doesn't concern me."

"You're crazy—drunk!—you don't know what you're doing."

"For the first time in my life I do know what I'm doing." There was a glow in his face, a profound assurance that none who knew him had ever seen before in the eyes of Richard Tomlinson.

"God will punish you, Richard!"

"Do you know, Judith—this is a strange thing to say under the circumstances—but I feel right with God for the first time since I married you."

There was a spring in his step as he went up the stairs.

CHAPTER 26

Judith thought, "He must be stopped. Else he'll leave tonight."

She ran swiftly up the back stairs and burst into Miss Ann's room without knocking.

"Come quick! Richard's planning to follow Thorne to California."

Ann Tomlinson was reading her Bible. There had been no family prayers this night. She closed the book and laid it aside.

"Where is Richard?"

"In Will's room, I think."

Miss Ann went down the hall and tapped at a door that muffled a sound of voices. The voices ceased.

"Who is it?" called Will.

"Your mother."

The door opened to admit Miss Ann. Judith remained outside.

There was a rise and fall of voices for minutes—hours, it seemed—before Ann Tomlinson came out. Judith could not hide the trembling of her lips as she put the question: "Well?"

"I'm afraid there's nothing we can do, Judith. He seems to have made up his mind."

"You mean—you're just going to stand by and let him go?"

"He is a grown man. He has a right to make his own decisions."

This quiet acceptance of so cataclysmic an event was incredible. That the Tomlinsons, with their strict code, should not move heaven and earth to prevent it was beyond belief.

Yet when Judith spoke to Will she met the same strange neutrality.

"It's Richard's business. Not mine."

'The girl might be considered your business," retorted Judith.

"Thorne never bound herself to me," was Will's reply.

"Well, Richard bound himself to me, and I don't intend to let him make a fool of himself."

Richard, meantime, was making hurried preparations for departure. He put together a few personal necessities—no more than would go in his saddlebags—and filled a money belt with all the currency the house yielded. Brother and mother not only watched but actually aided in these preparations. The only deterring word spoken was Will's suggestion that Richard wait till morning to give the horses a rest. They had been run pretty hard that day.

But Richard would not brook even this delay. He wouId ride his own horse as far as Turner's and get a fresh mount there. His brother-in-law was always good for a horse trade.

When Judith appealed again to Richard's mother Miss Ann said, "If he's going, the sooner he starts, the better. He'll lose the trail if that wagon gets too far ahead."

"Then you're going to let him go and do nothing about it?"

Tears filled Ann Tomlinson's eyes. There was nothing she could say.

"So! The Tomlinson religion is only skin-deep after all," sneered Judith. "The household saint, the devout Methodist, who belieyes the Bible from cover to cover, can stand by and see her son desert his wife without lifting a finger to stop him."

"What can I do?"

"You could at least talk to him."

The small gray-haired mother shook her head. "The time for me to have talked to him, Judith, was before he married you."

But if Richard's mother and brother accepted the inevitable, his wife did not. Judith caught her husband as he was starting out to the barn to saddle his horse. She drew him into the kitchen and closed the door.

"I've something to say to you, Richard, before you go." "Nothing you can say will alter my intention." "You may change your mind when you have heard me." He waited with restive patience for whatever new threat or entreaty her desperation had evolved.

"If you go to that girl, I swear, as God is my witness, that I'll charge you with the murder of your first wife."

He stood for seconds, speechless. Then he laughed mirthlessly.

"You're forgetting what I saw last night, aren't you, Judith?" "You saw me hunting on the floor of a closet for a pair of old bedroom slippers. I told you nothing. I admitted nothing. But you talked at great length about a doll which you claimed was put on Abigail's bed for the purpose of frightening her to death. How did you know about the doll, Richard, if you didn't put it on the pillow yourself? You were the last person with Abigail before the doctor came. It was you who reported her ravings about a string tied round a doll's neck. You admitted last night that you told Otis Huse it was you who hid the doll under the closet floor, where he and Lucius Goff found it. I think it would be easy to convince Mr. Huse that you also put the doll on your wife's bed with murderous intent. And Otis Huse is a clever lawyer."

He looked at her in silence so long that her hand began moving toward her throat, where the nervous pain was gathering.

He said softly, "Your name should have been Jezebel." Then he drew a deep breath of release.

"Do your worst, Judith. Go to anyone you please. What you do can't hurt me now."

"Richard! I didn't mean it. I was only trying to frighten you. I love you, Richard. Everything I've done has been for iowe of you. Don't leave me, Richard—come back—come back "

Her cry fell upon empty air. He was gone.

She lifted her eyes to the kitehen shelf above her head. A neat row of canisters held a motley assortment of condiments and household remedies. She reached for one plainly marked with skull and crossbones.

She had not yet played her final card.

Richard was saddling his horse by the light of a lantern when Jesse Moffat came running out to the barn in his night clothes.

"Come quick! Judith's dying."

Richard said, "Oh no, she's not. She's staging another scene."

"Not this time. She's took bad. Miss Ann's sent young Will for the doctor. She says you're not to go till we see what's happened."

"What do you mean?"

"She thinks Judith's taken something."

As they hurried to the house they passed Will on his way to the barn.

"What's happened?" cried Richard.

Will shouted, "Judith's taken poison," and went on running toward the barn. A moment later he dashed out of the yard on Richard's saddled horse.

Still Richard did not believe it. This was another ruse of Judith's to keep him from leaving.

But when he found her laid on the bed in the alcove, moaning and writhing in pain, he was not so sure. Her face was contorted, wet with sweat, and she seemed to be in agony.

"Tell me just what happened," he said to his mother.

"I found her like this. Lying on the bed here, groaning. And I found this on the floor beside her." Miss Ann handed him a water tumbler. There was a small amount of cloudy liquid in the bottom and white powder adhered to the moist rim.

"Is there anything in the house that she could have taken?"

"There's cockroach powder on the shelf in the kitchen."

He and Judith had been talking in the kitchen. The glass and powder had been close at hand.

"If she took something in the kitchen—by mistake, of course —why should she bring the glass in here?"

"If she did not take it by mistake," said Miss Ann significantly, "she might have wanted to be near the bed when she drank it."

Still Richard refused to believe that Judith would go so far as to commit suicide. He sat down beside her and felt her pulse. There was acceleration, but nervous excitement could have caused that. He wiped her face with his own handkerchief. The handkerchief was wet

He was sitting by her when the doctor came. Old Dr. Cax-ton, roused from sleep and none too alert, made a hasty examination of the contents of the water tumbler.

"Roach powder. Full of arsenic. A good strong emetic as fast as we can get it into her."

They worked with Judith for over an hour. When the emetic had done its utmost she lay weak and exhausted but no longer writhing. She was actually too sick now to move.

"Go to bed. Miss Ann. You too. Will. Richard and I will sit with her the rest of the night."

Dr. Caxton issued orders, took off his coat, and prepared to make himself comfortable by the living-room fire. There was nothing for Richard to do but follow his example. He could not explain to the family physician that he was on the point of leaving his wife, when that wife lay possibly dying. For The doctor made it quite clear that the solution in the glass was strong enough to kill ten women.

"I can't figure out how she happened to take the stuff," he said over and over.

"She thought she was taking salts," Richard said in sudden inspiration,

"Humph! That's what comes of keeping physics in a kitchen cupboard. It's a wonder to me . . ."

The doctor's voice droned on and on in comfortable monotone. Judith, lying behind the curtains of the alcove, smiled to herself. She was sick enough now—the emetic had been pure torture—but it was small price to pay for what she had accomplished. Vomiting never killed anyone, and it had convinced Richard that she was not malingering. It would be days, according to the doctor, before she could be pronounced out of danger. And Richard would not have the face to leave while Dr. Caxton was in attendance. When that time of grace had expired she would think of something else.

Meanwhile, a covered wagon, moving steadily westward, would soon be beyond hope of tracing.

Nothing could defeat her. She was too smart. It had been sheer genius to sprinkle that roach powder into a wet water tumbler and set it by her bed.

She fell asleep, well pleased with herself. She would outuit them all yet. She would keep Richard from Thorne, just as she had taken him from Abigail: by the use of her remarkable intelligence.

She awoke suddenly with a pain in her throat. She had no idea how late it was, but she felt as though she had slept a long while. It was the pain which had wakened her: the same old pain which Dr. Caxton had assured her was nothing but a nervous paroxysm of the larynx. She had half a mind to call to the doctor, whose voice beyond the alcove, mingled with Richard's, indicated that the two were still awake and talking.

But as she listened to the indistinct murmur she grew drowsy again and the pain began to subside. She drifted into a delicious state of semiconsciousness that was neither sleeping nor waking, but rather a dreamlike contemplation of all the delights that would be hers nowthat her path was cleared.

Like an overtone to this ecstasy was the rise and fall of Richard's voice beyond the bed curtains.

Then gradually this sweet delirium merged into a deep uneasiness. She could not have told when the change began; she had no prescience of its coming until suddenly it was there: that old horror which she had had so long and lost for a time, the consciousness of Something beside her. It was only an awareness, at first, of an inimical presence. But strive as she would, she could not shake off the thought or the image of her fear. She recognized it at last for what it was: Ahigail.

She had always known that someday she must have it out with Abigail. But for her to come now, when victory was within sight. To creep into her very bed and lie like this beside her, pretending that they two were sisters in defeat; that they had striven for the same prize and lost to the same opponent; that henceforth they must sleep forever side by side, the wives whom Richard Tomlinson had not loved. It was monstrous! Had the woman no sense, no shame, no delicacy, to be commiserating thus with a triumphant rival? Could she not see that Judith had won; that she had secured for herself everything which had escaped her predecessor? Then why must she pretend this loathsome sympathy and twine her emaciated arms round Judith's neck in suffocating compassion—closer, closer, tighter the embrace—until

God in heaven! It was no embrace—it was murder; the thin clutch about her throat was not a skinny arm—it was a band of velvet—twisting, tighter, tighter, tighter

''Richard!" she shrieked, and knew to her horror that she made no sound.

But the voices still came from beyond the curtains. She rose on her pillow to listen. She was not alone. They would not let her die like this. She would be able to scream when she had torn this band from her throat. Richard would come in a moment and waken her from this nightmare. . . .

And then she fell back on the pillows again as—incredible!—the band about her throat tightened, squeezing out her last breath.

In the chill dark hour before dawn the doctor roused from fitful slumber in his chair and went to his patient's bedside to see how she was resting. He found, to his shocked amazement, that she was dead. Death was due, apparently, to strangulation. The collar of her nightgown was ripped apart. Her throat was scratched as though nails had clawed it. Her face was the face of a sleeper in the grip of a terrible dream. But she was cold and still and lifeless.

He summoned Richard and Ann Tomlinson, but there was nothing to be done.

"I can't understand it." He repeated the words, be-wilderedly, over and over, "We sat here all night long. We never heard a sound, I supposed she was sleeping, so I never disturbed her "

Miss Ann said, "Were you awake all night?"

Both men admitted to dozing off shortly before daylight. They had talked for most of the night, Richard explained. They had talked to keep from going to sleep. If Juditli had called or made the slightest sound, he was sure they would have heard her.

The troubled old doctor said, "It must have been that the throat ailment she complained of was more serious than I realized—though damned if I could find anything organic. Maybe I'm getting too old to practice medicine. . , ."

What Richard's thoughts were, none present could have guessed. But a silent pressure of his hand exonerated his old friend from all blame.

They buried Judith one week from the day the big crowd gathered at Timberley. She was laid to rest beside Abigail, in the family burial ground between the poplars. People talked of it discreetly as they turned their faces homeward from attending the funeral. For the second time in two years Richard Tomlinson had stood by the newly made grave of a wife.

"Poor man! He's had enough to break him. No wonder he's leaving Timberley."

"Is he really going to California?"

"Starts tomorrow morning, I understand."

"Well, he always was a restless fellow. Never settled like his brother Will. Can't blame him, though, for wanting to get away. Hard on a man, burying two wives so close together."

FINALE

As the first pale promise of sunrise touched the waters of Little Raccoon, Richard rode his black horse down the lane and out through the grove to the turnpike. When he reached the rise of land he paused and looked back at the house where he was born. He could not see the faces of those whom he was leaving, but he knew that his mother's hair would be grayer, his children taller, ere he saw them again. He lifted his hat and waved—and said a prayer.

Then he turned his horse's head due west. Before him stretched a good rock road. Beyond that, miles of wilderness. And far ahead, by eight days' journey, a covered wagon. He did not know the route it had taken. He did not know the name of its occupants. He only knew that somewhere, someday, he would find Thorne, though he had nothing to follow except a ludicrous banner and a foolish song, slightly revised:

"Oh Susanna, oh, don't you cry for me, I'm goin' to California, my true love for to see...."