n an ordeal most painful and humiliating. None of her old friends
had spoken to her; many had even pointedly ignored her. Women excel in
that negative punishment which they deal out to any sister whom they
conceive to have deserved it. In a score of ways Margaret Vedder had
been made to feel that she was under a ban of disgrace and suspicion.

Some of this humiliation had not escaped Peter's keen observation; but
at the time he had regarded it as a part of the ill-will which he also
was consciously suffering from, and which he was shrewd enough to
associate with the mystery surrounding the fate of his son-in-law.
Connecting it with what Snorro had said, he took it for further proof
against his daughter. Thora's silence and evident desire to be left to
herself, were also corroborative. Did Thora also suspect her? Was
Margaret afraid to bring the minister, lest at the last Thora might
say something? For the same reason, had Thora's old intimates been
kept away? Sometimes the dying reveal things unconsciously; was
Margaret afraid of this? When once suspicion is aroused, every thing
feeds it. Twenty-four hours after the first doubt had entered Peter's
heart, he had almost convinced himself that Margaret was responsible
for Jan's death.

He remembered then the stories in the Sagas of the fair, fierce women
of Margaret's race. A few centuries previously they had ruled things
with a high hand, and had seldom scrupled to murder the husbands who
did not realize their expectations. He knew something of Margaret's
feelings by his own; her wounded self-esteem, her mortification at
Jan's failures, her anger at her poverty and loss of money, her
contempt for her own position. If she had been a man, he could almost
have excused her for killing Jan; that is, if she had done it in fair
fight. But crimes which are unwomanly in their nature shock the
hardest heart, and it was unwomanly to kill the man she had loved and
chosen, and the father of her child; it was, above all, a cowardly,
base deed to thrust a wounded man out of life. He tried to believe his
daughter incapable of such a deed, but there were many hours in which
he thought the very worst of her.

Margaret had no idea that her father nursed such suspicions; she felt
only the change and separation between them. Her mother's doubt had
been a cruel blow to her; she had never been able to speak of it to
her father. That he shared it, never occurred to her. She was wrapped
up in