ping by the motives and reasons which William Bolton had suggested,
she would not the less regard her father and mother as wicked tyrants.
The mother understood that very well. And she, though she was hard to
all the world besides, had never been hard to her girl. No tenderest
female bosom that ever panted at injustice done to her offspring was
more full than hers of pity, love, and desire. To save her Hester from
sin and suffering she would willingly lay down her life. And she knew
that in carrying out the scheme that had been proposed she must appear
to her girl to be an enemy,--to be the bitterest of all enemies! I have
seen a mother force open the convulsively closed jaws of her child in
order that some agonising torture might be applied,--which, though
agonising, would tend to save her sick infant's life. She did it
though, the child shrank from her as from some torturing fiend. This
mother resolved that she would do the same,--though her child, too,
should learn to hate her.

William Bolton undertook to go out to Folking and give the invitation
by which she was to be allured to come to Puritan Grange,--only for a
day and night if longer absence was objectionable; only for a morning
visit, if no more could be achieved. It was all treachery and
falsehood;--a doing of certain evil that possible good might come from
it. 'She will hate me for ever, but yet it ought to be done,' said
William Bolton; who was a good man, an excellent husband and father,
and regarded in his own profession as an honourable trustworthy man.

'She will never stay,' the old man said to his wife, when the others had
gone and they two were left together.

'I don't know.'

'I am sure she will never stay.'

'I will try.'

Mrs. Robert said the same thing when the scheme was explained to her.
'Do you think anybody could keep me a prisoner against my will,--unless
they locked me up in a cell? Do you think I would not scream?'

The husband endeavoured to explain that the screaming might depend on
the causes which had produced the coercion. 'I think you would scream,
and scream till you were let loose, if the person locking you up had
nothing to justify him. But if you felt that the world would be all
against you, then you would not scream and would not be let out.'

Mrs. Robert, however, seemed to think that no one could keep her in any
house against her own will without positive bolts, bars, and chains.

In the meantime much had been settle