On one of Cissy’s wakeful nights, she told Valancy her poor little story. They were sitting by the open window. Cissy could not get her breath lying down that night. An inglorious gibbous moon was hanging over the wooded hills and in its spectral light Cissy looked frail and lovely and incredibly young. A child. It did not seem possible that she could have lived through all the passion and pain and shame of her story.

“He was stopping at the hotel across the lake. He used to come over in his canoe at night — we met in the pines down the shore. He was a young college student — his father was a rich man in Toronto. Oh, Valancy, I didn’t mean to be bad — I didn’t, indeed. But I loved him so — I love him yet — I’ll always love him. And I — didn’t know