Mrs. Churchill shook her head. “Some day it’ll all come out,” she said, and her word was an assertion of her faith in the goodness of God. There was a pause, and then woman’s heart cried out to woman’s heart for sympathy. “I try to bear up and to endure it like he’d want me to. But it’s lonely, awful lonely.... Lookin’ ahead at the years to come--without him by me.... Come nighttime and it seems like I can’t bear it.” “But--but he’ll come back,” said Carmel. “_Back!_ Child, there hain’t no _back_ from where my husband’s gone.” Somehow this seemed to Carmel a statement of authority. It established the fact. Sheriff Churchill would never return, and his wife knew it. Something had informed her past doubting. It gave Carmel a strange, uncanny sensation, and she sat silent, chilled. Then an emotion moved in her, swelled, and lifted itself into her throat. It was something more than mere anger, it was righteous wrath. “Mrs. Churchill,” she said, “if this is true--the thing you believe--then there are men in Gibeon who are not fit to walk the earth. There is a thing here which must be crushed--unearthed and crushed.” “If it is God’s will.” “It must be God’s will. And if I can help--if I can do one single small thing to help----” “Mebby,” said Mrs. Churchill, solemnly, “He has marked you out and set you apart as His instrument.” “I want to think. I want to consider.” Carmel got to her feet. “I---- Oh, this is a wicked, cruel, cruel thing!...” She omitted, in her emotion, any word of parting, and walked from the house, eyes shining, lips compressed grimly. In her ears a phrase repeated itself again and again--“Mebby He has set you apart as His instrument....” On the Square she met Prof. Evan Bartholomew Pell, who first peered at her through his great beetle glasses and then confronted her. “May I ask,” he said, brusquely, “what decision you have reached concerning my letter?” “I am going to print it,” she said. He was about to pass on without amenities of any sort whatsoever, but she arrested him. “What are _your_ plans?” she asked. “I have none,” he said, tartly. “No plans and no money?” “That is a matter,” he said, “which it does not seem to me is of interest to anyone but myself.” She smiled, perceiving now he spoke out of a boyish shame and pride, and perceiving also in his eyes an expression of worry and bewilderment which demanded her sympathy. “No schools are open at this time of year,” she said. “None. I do not think I shall teach again.” “Why?” “I don’t like school trustees,” he said, simply, and one understood how he regarded the genus school trustee as a separate classification of humanity, having few qualities in common with the general human race. “I--I shall _work_,” he said. “At what? What, besides teaching, are you fitted to do?” “I--I can dig,” he said, looking at her hopefully. “Anybody can dig. Men who dig eat--and have a place to sleep. What more is there?”