“My sister has begged you to keep secret what you have seen to-night—has she not?” was Hetty’s first inquiry, spoken without haste and without excitement.

A mute bow replied.

“And you have promised to do it?”

“I told Mrs. Wayt that she might depend upon my discretion.”

“Which she construes into a pledge to connive at a wrong done to a church and a community,” in precisely the same tone and manner as before.

March stared at her perplexedly. What did the girl mean? And was this resolute, impassive woman of business the blushing trembler who, a month ago, could not deny her love for him? She was very serious now, but apparently very tranquil.

“You would say, if you were not too kind-hearted, that this is what I am doing—what I have been doing for nearly ten years—and you would be right. It would not exculpate me in your opinion if I were to represent that Mr. Wayt’s profession is all that stands between his family and the poorhouse; that I do not habitually attend the church in which he officiates, and that my name has never appeared upon the record of any one of the parishes of which he has had charge since I became a member of his family. Mr. Wayt and I have not exchanged a syllable directly for over five years. I neither respect nor like him. He can never forgive my knowledge of his character, and my interference with his habits. These were confirmed before I came to my sister.”

“Let me beg,” interposed March, “that you will not go on with what cannot but be distressing to you. You need no justification in my sight. If you will permit me to call to-morrow morning we can talk matters over calmly and at leisure. It is late, and you have had a severe nervous strain.”

“Unless you insist upon the postponement I would rather speak now, while my mind is steady in the purpose to make an end of subterfuge and concealment. I am weary, but it is of falsehoods, acted and spoken. Hester has told me of your generous pretense of misunderstanding the nature of Mr. Wayt’s attack. There it is again!”—relapsing into her usual tone, and with whimsical vexation that made March smile. “I am afraid I have forgotten how to be frank! My poor sister’s eager talk of ‘attacks’ and ‘seizures’ and ‘turns’ and ‘sunstroke’ and ‘constitutional headaches’ has unbalanced my perceptions of right and wrong.”

“You cannot expect me to agree with you there?” the suppressed smile becoming visible.

She was not to be turned aside from the straight track.

“Nothing so perverts conscience as a systematic course of concealment, even when it is practiced for what seem to be noble ends. I have felt this for a long time. Lately the sense of guilt has been insupportable. It may be relief—if not expiation—to tell the truth in the plainest terms I can use. It may leave me more wretched than I am now. But right is right.”

Her chin trembled and she raised her hand to cover it. Her admirable composure was smoldering excitement, kept under by will and the conscience whose rectitude she undervalued. With a sub-pang, March perceived that this disclosure was not a confidence, but a duty.

“Mr. Wayt was a confirmed opium eater and drinker, twelve years ago,” she resumed in a cold monotone. “He would drink intoxicating liquors, too, when narcotics were not to be had. I believe the appetite for the two is a common symptom of the habit. His wife shielded him, then, as she does now, and so successfully that he kept a church in Cincinnati for four years. Hester was a beautiful, active child, eight years old, and a great pet with her father. He does not care for children, as a rule, but she was pretty and clever and amused him. One day she begged her mother to let her take ‘dear papa’s’ lunch up to him. It was always ‘dear papa’ with her. He had a way of locking himself in his study from morning until night Saturday. Even his wife did not suspect that he wrote his Sunday sermon with a glass of laudanum and brandy at his side. He was busy upon a set of popular discourses on ‘Crying Sins of the Day.’ They drew immense crowds.”

A sarcastic gleam passed over her face, and for the first time the listener saw a likeness to the witty and wise cripple.

“Hester knocked again and again without getting answered. Then her father called out that he was busy and did not want any lunch. She was always willful, and he had indulged her unreasonably. So she declared that she would not go away until he opened the door and took the tray—not if she had to stand there and knock all day. He tore open the door in a fury, threw the tray and the lunch downstairs, and flung the child after it. The drugged drink had made him crazy.”

March shuddered.

“And that was the cause——”

“It left her what you see, now. The effect upon her character and feelings was, if possible, more deplorable. From that hour she has never spoken to her father at all, or of him as ‘papa.’ It is always ‘he’ and ‘him’ to the family, ‘Mr. Wayt’ to strangers. It seems horribly unnatural, but she loathes and despises him. While she lay crushed and suffering for the months that passed before she left her bed, she would go into convulsions at sight of him. Her mother begged her, on her knees, to ‘forgive poor papa, who had a delirious headache when he pushed her away from the door.’ Hester refused passionately. She is no more forgiving now. Yet she was so proud and shrewd, even then, that she never betrayed to the doctors how she was hurt. She let everybody believe that it was an accident. I had been her nurse for six months before she told me the fearful story.

“The truth never got abroad in Cincinnati, but flying rumors of Mr. Wayt’s growing eccentricities and the possible cause gathered an opposition party in the church. It was headed by a prominent druggist, who had talked with others in the trade from whom Mr. Wayt had bought opium, laudanum, and brandy. He has been more cunning in his purchases since then. He was obliged to resign his charge, and became what poor Hester calls ‘an ecclesiastical tramp.’ He controls his appetite within tolerably safe bounds for a while, sometimes for months, then gives way, and we live on the verge of discovery and disgrace until the crisis comes. The end is always the same. We break camp and ‘move on.’”

“Yet he brought clean papers to the Fairhill church.”

A dreary smile went with the answer.

“Clerical charity suffereth long and is kind! Out of curiosity I attended once a meeting of a presbytery that dismissed him from his church and commended him to another presbytery. We had narrowly escaped public exposure at that time. The sexton found Mr. Wayt in the condition you have seen this evening upon the floor of the lecture room and called in a physician, who boldly proclaimed that the man was ‘dead drunk.’ The accused put in a plea of indisposition and an overdose of brandy, inadvertently swallowed. His brethren, assembled in solemn session, spoke of his faithful work in the vineyard and the leadings of Divine Providence, and said that their prayers went with him to his new field of labor.

“I don’t want to be unjust or cynical, Mr. Gilchrist, and I can see that there is a pleasanter side to the case. There is such a thing as Christian charity, and more of it in the world than we are willing to admit. However church people may gossip about an unpopular pastor, and maneuver to get rid of him, when the parting comes they will not brand him in the eyes of others. And clergymen are very faithful to one another. It is really beautiful to see how they try to hide faults and foibles. It is a literal fulfillment of the command, ‘Bear ye one another’s burdens.’ In some—in most of Mr. Wayt’s charges—the secret of his frequent change of pastorate was not told. He was ‘odd,’ and ‘had nomadic tastes.’ Sometimes the climate did not agree with his health. The air was too strong or too weak. Twice poor Hester’s condition demanded an immediate change. We went to Chicago to be near an eminent surgeon, who, after all, never saw her.

“I will not weary you with the details of a life such as I pray God few families know. After a few years Hester and I became hopeless of anything better. Wherever we might go, change, and the probability of disgrace, were a mere question of time. My sister never loses faith in her husband and in an overruling Power that will not forsake the righteous. For, strange as it may seem, she believes in the piety of a man whose sacred profession is a continual lie.

“Oh, Mr. Gilchrist!” the enforced monotony of her tone wavering into a cry of pain—“I think that is the worst of all! When I recollect my mother’s pure religion—when I see your mother’s beneficent life and firm faith in goodness and in God—when I know that, in spite of the seeming untruthfulness which is, she thinks, necessary to protect her husband—my sister holds fast to her love and trust in an Almighty Friend, and walks humbly with her God, I feel such indignation against a man who is the slave of passion, selfish, vain, and conscienceless, and yet assumes to show such souls the way to heaven, that I dare not enter the church where he is allowed to preach, lest I should cry out in the face of his hearers against the monstrous cheat!”

Her eyes flamed clear; the torrent of feeling swept away reserve and coldness.

“I understand!” March said, with sympathetic warmth. “You never disappoint me. Tell me what I can do to help you. I cannot let you endure all this alone any longer.”

“Nobody can take my share of the burden. I would hardly know myself without it. It will be the heavier for my sister’s distress and Hester’s anger when they hear what I have decided to do. Hester was on her way over to your house when you met her, full of news she could not wait until to-morrow to tell. My mother’s only brother went to Japan thirty years ago and became rich. He died last March, leaving most of his fortune to benevolent institutions in America. To each of us, his sister’s children, he bequeathed ten thousand dollars. It is not a fortune, but with our modest tastes, and when joined to the little I already have, it will support us decently. My first thought, when the news reached us, a week ago, was ‘Now, Mr. Wayt need never take another charge! We need not live upon tainted food!’”

“You are a noble woman, Hetty——”

She interrupted him.

“I am not! This is not self-sacrifice, but self-preservation. If the money had not been given to us, I must have found some way out of a false position. I want you to tell your father all you know. Keep back nothing I have told you. He is a good and a merciful man. Let him speak openly to Mr. Wayt and forbid him ever to enter the pulpit again upon penalty of public exposure and suspension from the ministry. What Judge Gilchrist says will have weight. With all his high looks and sounding talk, Mr. Wayt is a coward. He would not venture to resist the decision. Then we will go away quietly. I have thought of the little town in which my sister and I were born. Living is cheap there and there are excellent schools for the children. Twenty-five thousand dollars will go very far in that region, and we can be honest people once more.”

“You have arranged it all, have you?” said March, not at all in the tone she had expected to hear. “Give them the cheap town, and the good schools, and the twenty-five thousand dollars by all means. They can have everything but you!”