shame upon them all and placed half the
continent between herself and the scene and consequences of her
iniquity, leaving her family to shoulder all its responsibilities, was
too monstrous for expression. They were Montgomerys _of_ Montgomery; it
seemed incredible that the town itself could ever recover from the shock
of her egregious transgression. They vied with each other in
manifestations of sympathy for Kirkwood, whose nobility under suffering
was so admirable; and they lavished upon Phil (it had been _like_ Lois,
they discovered, to label her with the preposterous name of Phyllis!) an
affection which became in time a trial to the child's soul.

Their fury gained ardor from the fact that their brother Amzi had never,
after he had blinked at them all when they visited him in his private
room at the bank the morning after the elopement, mentioned to any
living soul the passing of this youngest sister. It had been an occasion
to rouse an older brother and the head of his house to some dramatic
pronouncement. He should have taken a stand, they said, though just what
stand one should take, when one's sister has run off with another man
and left a wholly admirable husband and a winsome baby daughter behind,
may not, perhaps, have been wholly clear to the minds of the remaining
impeccable sisters. They demanded he should confiscate her share of
their father's estate as punishment; this should now be Phil's; they
wanted this understood and they took care that their friends should know
that they had made this demand of Amzi. But a gentleman of philosophic
habit and temper, who serenely views the world from his bank's doorstep,
need hardly be expected to break his natural reticence to thunder at an
erring sister, or even to gladden the gallery (imaginably the whole town
that bears his name) by transfers of property, of which he was the
lawful trustee, to that lady's abandoned heir.

Lois had caused all eyes to focus upon the Montgomerys with a new
intentness. Before her escapade they had been accepted as a matter of
course; now that she had demonstrated that the Montgomerys were subject
to the temptations that beset all mankind, every one became curious as
to the further definition of the family weaknesses. The community may be
said to have awaited the marriages of the three remaining Montgomery
girls in much the same spirit that a family physician awaits the
appearance of measles in a child that has been exposed to that ma