rthur said he saw it all, but he did not; he saw much that was not,
and much that was he saw not. He did not see that the dust of the old
street, and of the new town as well, was on Mrs. Morris's shoes; and
that Isabel, in a gown which she had left at the cottage when she went
to be mistress of his home, was really on the train, bound South.

Dropping all pretence of having any search to make, he hurried back to
his own room, and by and by told the pleasantly astonished Sarah and
Giles the simple truth as Mrs. Morris had put it into his mouth, but
told it in the firm belief that he was covering a hideous crime with an
all but transparent lie.

After a false show of breakfasting he went into his study,--"to work on
his sermon," he said; but did nothing there but pace the floor, hold his
head, and whisper, "It will not last an hour after _he_ has heard
it," and, "O God, have mercy! Oh, my wife, my wife! Oh, my brain, my
brain!"

XIX

A DOUBLE STILL HUNT

Mrs. Morris's task was too large for her. She had always taken such
care of her innocence that her cultivation of the virtues had been only
incidental. Hence, morally, she had more fat than fibre; and hence
again, though to her mind guilt was horrible, publicity was so much
worse that her first and ruling impulse toward any evil doing not her
own was to conceal it. That was her form of worldliness, the only fault
she felt certain she was free from. And here she was, without a helping
hand or a word of counsel, laboring to hide from the servants and from
the dear Byingtons, from the church and from a scoffing world, the
hideous fact that Isabel was a fugitive from the murderous wrath of a
jealous husband, and that the rector of All Angels had crumbled into
moral ruin.

"And oh," she cried, "is it the worst of it, or is it the best of it,
that in this awful extremity he keeps so sane, so marvellously sane?"
She said this the oftener because every few hours some new sign to the
contrary forced itself upon her notice. Oblivion was her cure-all.

For a while after his conference with Mrs. Morris Arthur made some
feeble show--for her eye alone--of looking after clews, and then, as
much to her joy as to her amazement, told her it was a part of his
detective strategy to return into his study, and seemingly to his
ordinary work, until time would allow certain unfoldings for which he
looked with confidence.

"Have you found out anything?" she asked, with a glaring