The Catholic bulletin. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1911-1995, 1912-02-10

| ldQ DGSS6u lOT priest, anu halpn
Eliot, plant in his anguish, had
needed her cry and summoned min
lister of the Church he hated to her
bedside. The priest had extorted a
promise that If she lived she would
leave Eliot. She had lived, but who
| could expect her to keep such a
promise? Yet it had left her unac-
countably depressed. 1t was almost
as hard to escape from an inherited
conscience as 1t was to escape from
an inherited vice.
Free at last!" the woman's lips ut
tered again the cry Of her soul She
would go back to the Church, she would
be remarked by priest, she would
be such tender mother to Aileen.
God forgive me for being so glad!
I wouldn't have lifted a finger to harm
Dan-if I could say the word that
would bring him to life I'd speak it,
yes, would, and take my chances of
damnation with Ralph! But now that
he is dead and I am free how can I
help being glad?"
OF course, there would be hideous
clatter of tongues dragging out of
the ugly facts of her past-women
| were SO cruel to other women; but So
ciety in the aggregate would not be
too curious about Ralph Eliot's wife.
He was too powerful, too rich for a
scandal about his wife to come out
into the open. The charity of the
world for it's great ones covers null
! i%.31 oF cir oh I,
ago. If she had gone back to eDan
| Keegan how society would have
gloated over her fall, but she had not
gone back!
Poor Dan-of course he was too
pious to marry again. What lone
ly, wretched life he must have lived
suppose his old mother is dead long
ago-Aileen, where are your"
Possibly, it was some other Dan
| Keegan-."
The thought made her faint and
weak. The woman sprang from her
chair and rang the bell.
Telephone for cab" she COM
manded to the startled ears of the but
Ter. A public cab would be less con-
spicuous than the Eliot motor with the
Eliots' keen-brained chauffeur.
Fifteen minutes later Mrs. Eliot,
yelled and muffied in furs, entered a
cab and gave the address at Dunbar's
undertaking parlors to the wondering
cabman.
The snow had stopped and the air
was growing very cold. A vision of
Dan Keegan in the awful immobility
of death blanched her cheeks. It was
| already quite dark.
She leaned back in the cab and
formulated her plans; she would claim
the body, pay the expenses and have
the coffin sent to Cleveland. Then she
would go on quietly, take possession
of Aileen, and slip away with her to a
good school where the girl could be
| fitted for her mothers world.
The cab was passing a church. Its
steeples doomed tall and black against
starless night. She would have
Masses said for Dan. Now, at last,
he would receive the benefit from
Ralph Eliot's money. Would he turn
In his grave-in dumb protest? But
no; the dead put off with their bodies
the hatreds of the living. If Dan could
look into her heart surely he would
forgive her.
| The cab turned corner and her
eyes took in the Illuminated facade of
Madame Celestine's dressmaking es-
Enlistment. Just that morning she
had been there for a fitting. If she
had never seen Ralph Eliot she would
now be ordering cheap mourning from
little seamstress as Dan Keegan's
widow. But Katharine Eliot had new
er been Kittie Keegan-the two were
distinct personalities, although inhab-
iting the same body, not even that
the body had changed twice accord
ing to biologists In the sixteen years
of her new life; the one person, an
ignorant, uniformed girl, married to a
man whom she had outgrown, had
vanished from the earth. What mat
tered it where, how or when? And the
woman who had taken her place, who
had her eyes, her hair, her smile, was
Ralph Eliot's wife. But there was
Aileen, and Aileen was Dan Keegan's
daughter and hers!
"Am going mad?"
How slowly the man was driving!
Would he never reach Dunbars? The
streets were getting narrower, and the
houses dingier and more squalid.
| Plainly Dunbar's was not intended for
the rich.
The cab stopped and the driver was
opening the door. Mrs Eliot shook
as IL with ague, and her lips showed
blue under the Pickering light of the
cab lamps.
A thin little man In black admitted
her into narrow, musty passage, and
led the way to a tiny reception-room
where rusty stove, holding a quart