“Not to take Amy with us. She must wait till they know.”

“Then my wife is only to be received on sufferance!”

“After what you have done, it is hardly any wonder that our father should be angry with you. It is possible he may refuse even to see you.”

“Then I’m not going! Better stay here and starve if they won’t receive my wife!”

“If so, I must at once tell Amy what you have done. She will have to know everything someday, but it ought to come from you, not me. You will never be fit for honest company till you have told your wife how you have deceived both her and your family.”

Hester thought she must not let him fancy that things would now go back into the old grooves—that his crime would become a thing of no consequence and pass by, ignored and forgotten. Evil cannot be destroyed without repentance.

He was silent as one who had nothing to answer.

“So now,” said Hester, “will you, or must I, tell Amy that she cannot go home with us, and why?”

He thought for a moment.

“I will,” he said.

Hester left him and sent Amy to him. In a few minutes she returned. She had been weeping, but now looked quite in control of herself.

“Please, miss,” she said—but Hester interrupted her.

“You must not call me miss, Amy,” she corrected. “You must call me Hester. Am I not your sister?”

A gleam of joy shone from the girl’s eyes, like the sun through red clouds.

“Then you have forgiven me!” she cried.

“No, Amy. I had nothing to forgive you of. You may have been foolish, but everybody can’t always be wise. And now we must have time to set things straighter without doing more mischief, and you mustn’t mind staying a little while with Miss Dasomma.”

“You won’t be too hard on him when he hasn’t me to comfort him—will you, Hester?”

“I will think of my new sister who loves him,” replied Hester. “But I love him too, Amy. Oh, Amy! you must be very careful over him. You must help him to become good, for that is the highest duty of everyone toward a neighbour, particularly of a wife toward a husband.”

Amy was crying afresh, but there was no shadow of resentment in her weeping.

—Thirty-Nine —

Things at Yrndale

In the meantime things had been very gloomy at Yrndale. Mrs. Raymount was better in health but hardly more cheerful. She could not get over the sadness of what her boy had become. But the thing that most oppressed her was to see the heart of his father so turned from the youth. Cornelius had not been pleasant since he first began to come within sight of manhood. But she had always looked to the time when growing sense would prevail, and now this was the outcome of her hopes and prayers for him! Her husband went about sullen and listless. He wrote no more. How could one thus disgraced in his family presume to teach the world anything? How could he any longer hold his head up? Cornelius’s very being cast doubt on all he had ever said or done!