"How con you bear to give so much pain to everyone who loves you?
Is your wonderful salary worth more to you than being here with your mother--with me?
How can you say you love me--and ruin both our lives like this?
I cannot come to see you--I _would_ not come to see you--calling at the back door! Finding the girl I love in a cap and apron! Can you not see it is wrong, utterly wrong, all this mad escapade of yours?
Suppose you do make a thousand dollars a year--I shall never touch your money--you know that.

I cannot even offer you a home, except with my family, and I know how you feel about that; I do not blame you.
"But I am as stubborn as you are, dear girl; I will not live on my wife's money--you will not live in my mother's house--and we are drifting apart.

It is not that I care less for you dear, or at all for anyone else, but this is slow death--that's all." Mrs.Warden wrote now and then and expatiated on the sufferings of her son, and his failing strength under the unnatural strain, till Diantha grew to dread her letters more than any pain she knew.

Fortunately they came seldom.
Her own family was much impressed by the thousand dollars, and found the occupation of housekeeper a long way more tolerable than that of house-maid, a distinction which made Diantha smile rather bitterly.

Even her father wrote to her once, suggesting that if she chose to invest her salary according to his advice he could double it for her in a year, maybe treble it, in Belgian hares.
_"They'd_ double and treble fast enough!" she admitted to herself; but she wrote as pleasant a letter as she could, declining his proposition.
Her mother seemed stronger, and became more sympathetic as the months passed.