hard to realize a thing that every experience of life teaches. We keep on thinking of offences against the common good as if they were abstractions!"
"Well, one thing," said Clara, "I shall always think unnecessarily shocking and disgraceful about it. And that is Ben's going out with her on this journey. I don't see how you could allow that, Eustace."
"Yes," said Atherton, after a thoughtful silence, "it is shocking. The only consolation is that it is not unnecessarily shocking. I'm afraid that it's necessarily so. When any disease of soul or body has gone far enough, it makes its own conditions, and other things must adjust themselves to it. Besides, no one knows the ugliness of the situation but Halleck himself. I don't see how I could have interfered; and upon the whole I don't know that I ought to have interfered, if I could. She would be helpless without him; and he can get no harm from it. In fact, it's part of his expiation, which must have begun as soon as he met her again after he came home."
Clara was convinced, but not reconciled. She only said, "I don't like it."
Her husband did not reply; he continued musingly: "When the old man made that final appeal to her jealousy,—all that there is really left, probably, of her love for her husband,—and she responded with a face as wicked as his, I couldn't help looking at Halleck—"
"Oh, poor Ben! How did he take it? It must have scared, it must have disgusted him!"
"That's what I had expected. But there was nothing in his face but pity. He understood, and he pitied her. That was all."
Clara rose, and turned to the window, where she remained looking through her tears at the gulls on the shallow. It seemed much more than twenty-four hours since she had taken leave of Marcia and the rest at the station, and saw them set out on their long journey with its uncertain and unimaginable end. She had deeply sympathized with them all, but at the same time she had felt very keenly the potential scandalousness of the situation; she shuddered inwardly when she thought what if people knew; she had always revolted from contact with such social facts as their errand involved. She got Olive aside for a moment, and asked her, "Don't you hate it, Olive? Did you ever dream of being mixed up in such a thing? I should die,—simply die!"
"I shall not think of dying, unless we fail," answered Olive. "And, as for hating it, I haven't consulted my feelings a great deal; but I rather think I like it."
"Like going out to be a witness in an Indiana divorce case!"
"I don't look at it in that way, Clara. It's a crusade to me; it's a holy war; it's the cause of an innocent woman against a wicked oppression. I know how you would feel about it, Clara; but I never was as respectable as you are, and I'm quite satisfied to do what Ben, and father, and Mr. Atherton approve. They think it's my duty, and I am glad to go, and to be of all the use I can. But you shall have my heartfelt sympathy through all, Clara, for your involuntary acquaintance with our proceedings."
"Olive! You know that I'm proud of your courage and Ben's goodness, and that I fully appreciate the sacrifice you're making. And I'm not ashamed of your business: I think it's grand and sublime, and I would just as soon scream it out at the top of my voice, right here in the Albany depot."
"Don't," said Olive. "It would frighten the child." She had Flavia by the hand, and she made the little girl her special charge throughout the journey. The old Squire seemed anxious to be alone, and he restlessly escaped from Marcia's care. He sat all the first day apart, chewing upon some fragment of wood that he had picked up, and now and then putting up a lank hand to rasp his bristling jaw; glancing furtively at people who passed him, and lapsing into his ruminant abstraction. He had been vexed that they did not start the night before; and every halt the train made visibly afflicted him. He would not leave his place to get anything to eat when they stopped for refreshment, though he hungrily devoured the lunch that Marcia brought into the car for him. At New York he was in a tumult of fear lest they should lose the connecting train on the Pennsylvania Road; and the sigh of relief with which he sank into his seat in the sleeping-car expressed the suffering he had undergone. He said he was not tired, but he went to bed early, as if to sleep away as much of the time as he could.
When Halleck came into their car, the next morning, he found Marcia and her father sitting together, and looking out of the window at the wooded slopes of the Alleghanies through which the train was running. The old man's impatience had relaxed; he let Marcia lay her hand on his, and he answered her with quiet submission, when she spoke now and then of the difference between these valleys, where the wild rhododendrons were growing, and the frozen hollows of the hills at home, which must be still choked with snow.
"But, oh! how much I would rather see them!" she said at last with a homesick throb.
"Well," he assented, "we can go right back—afterwards."
"Yes," she whispered.
"Well, sir, good morning," said the old man to Halleck, "we are getting along, sir. At this rate, unless our calculations were mistaken, we shall be there by midnight. We are on time, the porter tells me."
"Yes, we shall soon be at Pittsburg," said Halleck, and he looked at Marcia, who turned away her face. She had not spoken of the object of the journey to him since they had left Boston, and it had not been so nearly touched by either of them before.
He could see that she recoiled from it, but the old man, once having approached it, could not leave it. "If everything goes well, we shall have our grip on that fellow's throat in less than forty-eight hours." He looked down mechanically at his withered hands, lean and yellow like the talons of a bird, and lifted his accipitral profile with a predatory alertness. "I didn't sleep very well the last part of the night, but I thought it all out. I sha'n't care whether I get there before or after judgment is rendered; all I want is to get there before he has a chance to clear out. I think I shall be able to convince Bartley Hubbard that there is a God in Israel yet! Don't you be anxious, Marcia; I've got this thing at my fingers' ends, as clear as a bell. I intend to give Bartley a little surprise!"
Marcia kept her face averted, and Halleck relinquished his purpose of sitting down with them, and went forward to the state-room that Marcia and Olive had occupied with the little girl. He tapped on the door, and found his sister dressed, but the child still asleep.
"What is the matter, Ben?" she asked. "You don't look well. You oughtn't to have undertaken this journey."
"Oh, I'm all right. But I've been up a good while, with nothing to eat. That old man is terrible. Olive!"
"Her father? Yes, he's a terrible old man!"
"It sickened me to hear him talk, just now,—throwing out his threats of vengeance against Hubbard. It made me feel a sort of sympathy for that poor dog. Do you suppose she has the same motive? I couldn't forgive her!" he said, with a kind of passionate weakness. "I couldn't forgive myself!"
"We've got nothing to do with their motive, Ben. We are to be her witnesses for justice against a wicked wrong. I don't believe in special providences, of course; but it does seem as if we had been called to this work, as mother would say. Your happening to go home with her, that night, and then that paper happening to come to you,—doesn't it look like it?"
"It looks like it, yes."
"We couldn't have refused to come. That's what consoles me for being here this minute. I put on a bold face with Clara Atherton, yesterday morning at the depot; but I was in a cold chill, all the time. Our coming off, in this way, on such an errand, is something so different from the rest of our whole life! And I do like quiet, and orderly ways, and all that we
