“She has always been judged just by appearances,” she said in a low earnest tone, “valued just by impressions. Some people go through life with no one seeing the good in them because of the blurred, unbeautiful reflection they give back. ‘Now we see through a glass, darkly.’ I think it means in a mirror indistinctly—a dim, dull, imperfect mirror. It seems as if everybody saw Stella ‘through a glass, darkly,’ Stephen, even her own child tonight.”

She withdrew her hand. Stephen replied, still staring into the lifeless fireplace, “I lived with her. I knew her.”

“Oh, but Stephen—”

“My dear, my dear,” he interrupted tenderly, fondly. How strange that Helen should be the one to try to show him the good in Stella! “You see with the eyes of an angel.”

“No, I don’t,” said Helen prosaically. “Simply with the eyes of a mother, Stephen.”

Chapter 23

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

1

THE PROOF THAT Helen’s rainbow was real—no illusion, no mirage—came in the form of a shadow the following fall. It is dark by five o’clock in the afternoon in New York in November. Returning one late afternoon with Laurel from a tea, where with a dozen other girls of her own age she had been assisting (nominally assisting, but really, like the others, simply submitting herself to the demands of a crowd of young men blocking the entrance to the room cleared for dancing), Helen observed, as she left the car and crossed the sidewalk to her own door a shadow, a stationary shadow cast upon the sidewalk.

There was an alley ran down to a rear entrance at the spot where the shadow fell. There was a light a few feet down the alley. The light was dim. But in spite of the unrecognizable shape of the blurred outline of the shadow, it had startled Helen into a sudden suspicion.

Once inside the house she had mounted to an upper room, where there was no light, where she would attract no attention, and raising the drawn shade in a bay-window, gazed down into the alley, just back of the spot where the shadow had lain.

There was no one there now.

Quickly she turned and raised the shade of the window opposite. This window looked toward the rear of the house and commanded a view of the narrow, illy-lighted tunnel, along which towered the high, spiked walls of several scores of rear entrances. Proceeding along this tunnel, closely skirting the high spiked walls, Helen could make out the outline of a woman—a short stocky woman. Twice she stopped and looked back at Helen’s roof.