know what you want to say. You can't help that. No use
bothering your brains about that--now you just take my advice,"
exclaimed Mrs. Worthington brusquely.

Then she laughed so loud and suddenly that Therese, being already
nervous, pricked her finger with her needle till the blood came; a
mishap which decided her to lay aside her work.

"If you never saw a fish out of water, Mrs. Laferm, do take a peep at
Mr. Worthington astride that horse; it's enough to make a cat expire!"

Mrs. Worthington was on the whole rather inclined to take her husband
seriously. As often as he might excite her disapproval, it was seldom
that he aroused her mirth. So it may be gathered that his appearance
in this unfamiliar role of horseman was of the most mirth-provoking.

He and Hosmer were dismounting at the cottage, which decided Mrs.
Worthington to go and look after them; Fanny for the time being--in
her opinion--not having "the gumption to look after a sick kitten."

"This is what I call solid comfort," she said looking around the well
appointed sitting-room, before quitting it.

"You ought to be a mighty happy woman, Mrs. Laferm; only I'd think
you'd die of lonesomeness, sometimes."

Therese laughed, and told her not to forget that she expected them all
over in the evening.

"You can depend on me; and I'll do my best to drag Fanny over;
so-long."

When left alone, Therese at once relapsed into the gloomy train of
reflections that had occupied her since the day she had seen with her
bodily eyes something of the wretched life that she had brought upon
the man she loved. And yet that wretchedness in its refinement of
cruelty and immorality she could not guess and was never to know.
Still, she had seen enough to cause her to ask herself with a shudder
"was I right--was I right?"

She had always thought this lesson of right and wrong a very plain
one. So easy of interpretation that the simplest minded might solve it
if they would. And here had come for the first time in her life a
staggering doubt as to its nature. She did not suspect that she was
submitting one of those knotty problems to her unpracticed judgment
that philosophers and theologians delight in disagreeing upon, and her
inability to unravel it staggered her. She tried to convince herself
that a very insistent sting of remorse which she felt, came from
selfishness--from the pain that her own heart suffered in the
knowledge of Hosmer's unhappiness. She was not callou