To the Major's credit be it spoken, that he was incapable of betraying the trust thus committed to him. Quitting Doctor Remy's office, he went in search of old Cato, put the premises in his charge during the absence of his mistress, promised him an occasional visit of inspection (and a sound thrashing if all was not found in complete order), made due provision for his maintenance, and then took himself grumblingly home, to drown the remnant of his chagrin in the Lethean glass that had already swallowed up so many of his better thoughts, impulses, and characteristics. Of course, Mrs. Lyte's departure--or flight, as it was not infrequently termed--made the nine days' wonder of Berganton. Some few gentle, charitable souls there were, no doubt, who, judging their neighbor by themselves, saw no harm either in the fact or the manner of her going. She was ill; so was her daughter; they had neither time nor heart for leavetakings. But there were others, wise in the crooked ways of the human heart through much practice therein, who scrupled not to find motives and objects for the course of the pale-faced widow and her gifted daughter, with which it is not necessary to stain this page. There was the more room for this, inasmuch as Major Bergan, partly out of consideration for Mrs. Lyte, and partly out of shame on his own account, had taken care that the existence of the mortgage should not transpire. Yet Mrs. Lyte had depended upon the ultimate disclosure of this fact, to furnish that explanation of her departure which she had shunned to give herself, and to turn the current of popular sympathy in her favor. In yielding to Astra's morbid desire not only to leave the scene of her untoward love behind, but to do it in such swift and silent wise that neither curiosity, nor sympathy, nor malevolence, could immediately follow them, to inflict their various torture upon her sore heart, Mrs. Lyte had looked confidently forward to this forthcoming justification of her step. Her old friends, she thought, would be sure to understand the feeling that led her to flee from the sight of the sale of her lifelong home (it might be under the auctioneer's hammer), and to shut off all means of communication between herself and the painful transaction, until time had given her strength to bear it.