Roy did not stop to consider that no such luxurious appendage as a dog-kennel was to be found on Miss Pepper’s premises. He only remembered her cruelty to Edna, and the “pale-gray look which came into her face,” and the “steel-gray look in her eye,” as she took off her wedding ring, and then sat looking out at the blighted rose-tree, seeing there her future life. Roy was not much given to poetry, or sentiment, or flowery speeches, but he saw the connection between Edna and the blighted tree, and knew why it should have had a greater fascination for her than her aunt’s rasping tirade. “She is a blighted rose herself,” he said, “or rather a blighted bud, only seventeen, as much a girl as she ever was, a wife of a few hours, a widow turned out into the world to shirk for herself with an assumed debt of, let me see, that two hundred to me, four hundred more to that miserly old sanctimonious Pepper, prating about High Church and Low, and arrogating to herself all the piety of both parties, just because she stands up straight as a rail during the creed, and believes Lorenzo Dow as divinely appointed to preach as St. Peter himself; that makes six hundred, besides that bill in Canandaigua, which Pepper says she’s resolved to pay. Eight hundred dollars. Before she gets all that paid there’ll be a grayer look in her eyes and on her poor little face than there was when she looked at the blighted rose-tree. And here I have more money than I know what to do with. I’ll go for her at once, go this very day,” and forgetting his lame leg in his excitement, Roy sprang to his feet, but a sharp twinge of pain brought him to his senses, and to his chair again. “I can’t go. Confound it. I’m a cripple,” he said: then, as he remembered that he did not know where Edna was, he groaned aloud, and blamed himself severely for having indulged in his old habit of procrastination, and so deferred the writing of his letter to Edna until it was too late. For of course she never got it. If she had, it might have changed her whole line of conduct. At least, she would have known that she had two friends, one Roy, and the other the one she had mentioned to her aunt as powerless to help her. Who was he? for she distinctly said _he_. “Not that ass of a Dana sure, else she had not fled from him and his offer,” and with his sound leg Roy kicked a footstool as the combined representative of the audacious Dana and Miss Jerusha Pepper. He was glad that woman was no nearer relative to Edna than great aunt, and so was his mother, for after his ebullition of anger was over, he decided to take the letter to her, and tell her what Edna had written to himself. As Georgie was not present, there was no counter influence at work, and Roy’s voice and manner told plainly which way he leaned.