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“Grandfather, this letter is from my aunt. She wishes me to go and live with her and prepare for the stage. I told her I wished to do so. I am going.”

Cyrus and Deborah looked at her in mute dismay.

“I know you despise the profession of an actress,” the girl went on with heightened colour. “I am sorry you think so about it because it is the only one open to me. I must go … I must.”

“Yes, you must,” said Cyrus cruelly. “It’s in your blood … your bad blood, girl.”

“My blood isn’t bad,” cried Joscelyn proudly. “My mother was a sweet, true, good woman. You are unjust, Grandfather. But I don’t want you to be angry with me. I love you both and I am very grateful indeed for all your kindness to me. I wish that you could understand what….”

“We understand enough,” interrupted Cyrus harshly. “This is all I have to say. Go to your play-acting aunt if you want to. Your grandmother and me won’t hinder you. But you’ll come back here no more. We’ll have nothing further to do with you. You can choose your own way and walk in it.”

With this dictum Joscelyn went from Spring Valley. She clung to Deborah and wept at parting, but Cyrus did not even say goodbye to her. On the morning of her departure he went away on business and did not return until evening.

* * * * *

Joscelyn went on the stage. Her aunt’s influence and her mother’s fame helped her much. She missed the hard experiences that come to the unassisted beginner. But her own genius must have won in any case. She had all her mother’s gifts, deepened by her inheritance of Morgan intensity and sincerity … much, too, of the Morgan firmness of will. When Joscelyn Morgan was twenty-two she was famous over two continents.

When Cyrus Morgan returned home on the evening after his granddaughter’s departure he told his wife that she was never to mention the girl’s name in his hearing again. Deborah obeyed. She thought her husband was right, albeit she might in her own heart deplore the necessity of such a decree. Joscelyn had disgraced them; could that be forgiven?

Nevertheless both the old people missed her terribly. The house seemed to have lost its soul with that vivid, ripely tinted young life. They got their married daughter’s oldest girl, Pauline, to come and stay with them. Pauline was a quiet, docile maiden, industrious and commonplace–just such a girl as they had vainly striven to make of Joscelyn, to whom Pauline had always been held up as a model. Yet neither Cyrus nor Deborah took to her, and they let her go unregretfully when they found that she wished to return home.

“She hasn’t any of Josie’s gimp,” was old Cyrus’s unspoken fault. Deborah spoke, but all she said was, “Polly’s a good girl, Father, only she hasn’t any snap.”

Joscelyn wrote to Deborah occasionally, telling her freely of her plans and doings. If it hurt the girl that no notice was ever taken of her letters she still wrote them. Deborah read the letters grimly and then left them in Cyrus’s way. Cyrus would not read them at first; later on he read them stealthily when Deborah was out of the house.

When Joscelyn began to succeed she sent to the old farmhouse papers and magazines containing her photographs and criticisms of her plays and acting. Deborah cut them out and kept them in her upper bureau drawer with Joscelyn’s letters. Once she overlooked one and Cyrus found it when he was kindling the fire. He got the scissors and cut it out carefully. A month later Deborah discovered it between the leaves of the family Bible.

But Joscelyn’s name was never mentioned between them, and when other people asked them concerning her their replies were cold and ungracious. In a way they had relented towards her, but their shame of her remained. They could never forget that she was an actress.