ly false
eagerness that gave him a new panic of suspicion and whetted his
cunning.

He said he had, but must beg her not to ask yet what it was. Then he
inquired if any neighbor had left town that morning for Boston, and her
heart rose into her throat as she marked the subtlety he could not keep
out of his dark face.

"Why, ye--yes--n--no, no one that I know of ex--except Leonard
Byington," she replied, and thought, "If he should accuse Leonard, we
are undone!"

To avoid that risk she would have told him, then and there, all she
knew, had she not feared she might draw his rage upon herself for aiding
the wife's flight. She must, must, must keep on good terms with him till
she and Isabel could somehow get the child. So passed the awful hours,
mother and husband each marvelling in agony over the ghastly puzzle of
the other's apathy.

Later in the day she knocked timorously at his study door. She had come
with a silly little proposition that he let her take the infant and go
South as if to join Isabel. Thus the trunk would not lie in the express
office down there, unclaimed and breeding awkward inquiries, and she
from that point, with him at this, could keep up the illusion they had
invented until Isabel herself should--eh--return!

But when he let her in, he stood before her a silent embodiment of such
remorse and foreboding that she could have burst into sobs and cries.

Yet she broached her plan, trembling visibly, while he heard her through
with melancholy deference.

In reply he commended it, but called to her notice how much better it
would be for her to go alone. Then the babe, left behind, would be an
unspoken yet most eloquent guarantee that its mother would soon
reappear.

"Very true," responded the emboldened lady; "yet on the other hand"--

He put out an interrupting touch. "The child is as safe with me as if it
were in its mother's bosom."

"Oh, it isn't so much a question of safety as"--

The father interrupted again, with a gleam in his eyes like the
outflashing of a knife. "I hold the child against all comers, and would
if I had to slay its mother to do it."

Mrs. Morris stifled an outcry and would have left him, but he would not
let her.

"Stay! Oh, listen to a soul in torment! The babe is already motherless.
Isabel can never return, mother; she is with the dead. I am not waiting
idly here for her; I am waiting busily--for her slayer. He has fled; but
when he sees he is not pursued he wil