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 glaringly 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.