t very inconsistent," Mrs. Munger urged, "after all he used
to say against Mr. Northwick?"

"I suppose it's a professional, not a personal matter," said Wilmington.

"And then, their putting on mourning! Just think of it!" Mrs. Munger
appealed to Mrs. Wilmington, who was listening to her nephew's savagery
of tone and phrase with the lazy pleasure she seemed always to feel in
it.

"Yes. Do you suppose they meant it for a blind?"

"Why, that's what people think now, don't they?"

"Oh, _I_ don't know. What do _you_ think, Jack?"

"I think they're a pack of fools!" he blurted out, like a man who
avenges on the folly of others the hurt of his own conscience. He cast a
look of brutal contempt at Mrs. Munger, who said she thought so, too.

"It is too bad the way people allow themselves to talk," she went on.
"To be sure, Sue Northwick has never done anything to make herself loved
in Hatboro'--not among the ladies at least."

Mrs. Wilmington gave a spluttering laugh, and said, "And I suppose it's
the ladies who allow themselves to talk as they do. I can't get the men
in my family to say a word against her."

Jack scowled his blackest. "It would be a pitiful scoundrel that did.
Her misfortunes ought to make her sacred to every one that has the soul
of a man."

"Well, so it does. That is just what I was saying. The trouble is that
they don't make her sacred to every one that has the soul of a woman,"
Mrs. Wilmington teased.

"I know it doesn't," Jack returned, in helpless scorn, as he left Mrs.
Munger alone to his aunt.

"_Do_ you suppose he still cares anything for her?" Mrs. Munger asked,
with cosey confidentiality.

"Who knows?" Mrs. Wilmington rejoined, indolently. "It would be very
poetical, wouldn't it, if he were to seize the opportunity to go back to
her?"

"Beautiful!" sighed Mrs. Munger. "I do _like_ a manly man!"

She drove home through the village slowly, hoping for a chance of a
further interchange of conjectures and impressions; but she saw no one
she had not already talked with till she met Dr. Morrell, driving out of
the avenue from his house. She promptly set her phaeton across the road
so that he could not get by, if he were rude enough to wish it.

"Doctor," she called out, "what _do_ you think of this extraordinary
letter of Mr. Northwick's?"

Dr. Morrell's boyish eyes twinkled. "You mean that letter in the
_Events_? Do you think Northwick wrote it?"

"Why, don't _you_, doctor?" she ques