“For which we should return special thanks, public and private,” she went on to say, walking, with her little girl, abreast with Judge and Mrs. Gilchrist, the boys falling back with the young people. “At least, those of us who are the mothers of American boys. I can breathe with tolerable freedom now until the next Fourth of July. What a fearful storm we had last night! My baby was awakened by it and wanted to know if it was ‘torpetoes or firetrackers?’ Yet, since we owe our beautiful Sabbath to the thunder and rain, we may be thankful for it; as for many other things that seem grievous in the endurance.” “I hope Mr. Wayt’s headache is not in consequence of having sat up until daybreak, as he threatened to do,” the judge said, in a genial voice that reached his son’s ears. March listened breathlessly for the reply. “I think not. I did not ask him this morning at what time he left his study. He is not inclined to be communicative with regard to his sins of commission in that respect, but I suspect he is an incorrigible offender. He attributes his headache—verbally—to the extraordinary heat of yesterday. We all suffered from it, more or less, and it increased rather than diminished, after sunset.” “Is Mr. Wayt well enough to take the service this morning?” “Oh, yes!” quickly emphatical. “It would be a severe indisposition indeed that would keep him out of the pulpit. Both his parents suffered intensely from nervous and sick headaches, so he could hardly hope to escape. I have observed that people who are subject to constitutional attacks of this kind, are seldom ill in any other way, particularly if the headaches are hereditary. How do you account for this, Judge Gilchrist? Or, perhaps, you doubt the statement itself.” March did not trouble his brains with his father’s reply. The volubility of one whose discourse was generally distinctively refined and moderate in tone and terms would of itself have challenged attention. But what was her object in saying that she had not inquired at what hour her husband left his study last night? Since she and her sister were in occupation of the room from midnight—probably before that hour—until two in the morning, she certainly knew that he was not there and almost as surely where he was and how engaged during those hours. Where was the need of duplicity in the circumstances? Was she committed to uphold the professional fiction, which her husband circulated vauntingly, that his best pulpit preparation must be done when honest people are asleep in their beds—that the beaten oil of the sanctuary must flow through lamp-wick or gas-burners? What end was subserved by supererogatory diplomacy and subterfuge? “How are the two Hesters to-day, Mrs. Wayt?” asked May, from the side of her puzzled brother. “Hester is rather languid. The heat again!”