“But, my Lord, Julie, what else could they do?  You were paying all the expenses, I suppose?”

“No, indeed I wasn’t!  Chester has a pretty fair salary now, and my aunt’s boys are awfully good about helping out.  And then Muriel has a position, and Evelyn is in a fair way to be a rich woman.  Besides, the mere question of where money is coming from never worried my people!  They managed as well with almost nothing at all, as with a really adequate amount—­which is to say that they don’t know in the least what the word manage means!  Jim left me an immense sum, Rich, but I’ve never touched anything but the interest.  When we shingled or carpeted or gardened out there, we paid for it by degrees, and it cost, I must admit, only about one third of what it would have been on the other side of town.  I look back now at those first months, more than four years ago,” went on Julia, smiling as she leaned forward in her low chair, her hands locked about her knees, her thoughtful eyes on the flickering logs, “and I wonder we didn’t all rise up in the night and kill each other.  I was like a person with a death wound, struggling madly through the little time left me, absolutely indifferent to what any one thought.  I simply wanted to die fighting, to register one furious protest against all the things I’d hated, and suffered, too!  I remember reporters coming, at first, wild with curiosity to know what took Doctor Studdiford abroad, and why Mrs. Studdiford was living in a labourer’s house in the Mission.  What impression they got I haven’t the faintest idea.  Once or twice women called, just curious of course, Mrs. Hunter and Miss Saunders—­but that soon stopped.  I was better hidden on Shotwell Street than I would have been in the heart of India!  Miss Saunders came in, and met Mama and Grandma; we were having the kitchen calcimined, the place was pretty well upset, I remember.  Dear me, how little what they thought or did or said seemed to count, when my whole life was one blazing, agonizing cry for Jim!”

“That got better?” Richard asked huskily, after a pause.

“Rich, I think the past two, well, three years, have been the happiest in my life,” Julia said soberly.  “My feet have been on solid ground.  I not only seem to understand my life better as it is, but all the past seems clearer, too.  I thought Jim was like myself, Richie, but he wasn’t; his whole viewpoint was different; perhaps that’s why we loved each other so!”

“And suppose he comes back?” Richard asked.

Julia frowned thoughtfully.

“Oh, Richie, how do I know!  It’s all so mixed up.  Everybody, even Aunt Sanna, thinks that he will!  Everybody thinks I am a patient, much-enduring wife, waiting for the end of an inexplicable situation.  Aunt Sanna thinks it’s temporary aberration.  Your father thinks there’s another woman in it.  Your mother confided to Aunt Sanna that it is her opinion that Bab refused Jim, and Jim married from pique.”