She did not lift her eyes again to Mrs.Tucker's, but, slowly raising herself from her seat, said, "I wish to God I did lie; but it's true.

And it's true that I never touched a cent of the money, but gave it all to him!" She laid her hand on Patterson's arm, and said, "Come! let us go," and led him a few steps towards the gateway.

But here Patterson paused, and again passed his hand over his melancholy brow.
The necessity of coherently and logically closing the conversation impressed itself upon his darkening mind.

"Then you don't happen to have heard anything of Spencer ?" he said sadly, and vanished with Mrs.Baxter through the gate.
Left alone to herself, Mrs.Tucker raised her hands above her head with a little cry, interlocked her rigid fingers, and slowly brought her palms down upon her upturned face and eyes, pressing hard as if to crush out all light and sense of life before her.

She stood thus for a moment motionless and silent, with the rising wind whispering without and flecking her white morning dress with gusty shadows from the arbor.
Then, with closed eyes, dropping her hands to her breast, still pressing hard, she slowly passed them down the shapely contours of her figure to the waist, and with another cry cast them off as if she were stripping herself of some loathsome garment.