At this point an idea entered his brain, carrying a flood of light with it. Mrs. Wayt was an author—one of the many ministers’ wives who eke out insufficient salaries by writing for Sunday-school and church papers! It was a matter of moment—perhaps of ten dollars—to get off a MS. by a given time, and Hetty had taken it down in typewriting from her dictation and the rough draught. Of a certainty, here was the solution of the mysterious vigil, and of Mrs. Wayt’s equivocation! She looked like a woman who would write over the signature of “Aunt Huldah” in the Children’s Column, or “Theresa Trefoil” in the Woman’s Work-table, and dread lest her identity with these worthies should be suspected by her husband’s people, or by even “dear Percy” himself. March experienced a blessed letting-down of the whole system—a surcease from worrying thought, so sudden that a deep sigh escaped him that made his mother glance askance at him. Instead of admiring the brave industry of the true wife he had suffered a whimsical prejudice to poison his mind against her. He despised himself as a midnight spy and gossip hunter, in the recollection of the orchard vigil. The patient, unseasonable toil of the sisters became sublime. “_Who has not heard the story of the drummer boy of Gettysburg?_” thundered the preacher, raising eagle eyes from the manuscript laid between the Bible leaves. March jumped as if the fulmination were chain-shot. Mrs. Gilchrist, looking full at him, saw his color flicker violently, his fingers clinch hard upon the palms. Then he became so ghastly that she whispered: “Are you ill?” “A sharp pain in my side! It will be gone in a moment,” he whispered back, his lips contracting into a smile. Rather a sword in his heart. The light within him was darkness. How foolish not to have solved the mean riddle at a glance! Mr. Wayt’s sensational sermons were composed by his clever wife, and transcribed by her as clever sister! Here was the secret of the sense of unreality and distrust that had haunted him in this man’s presence from the beginning of their acquaintanceship. The specious divine was a fraud out and out, and through and through a cheap cheat. No wonder now, at the swift itinerancy of his ministry! His talk of midnight study was a lie, his pretense of scholarship a trick so flimsy that a child should have seen through it. He had gone to bed the evening before, and taken his rest in sleep, while his accomplices got up to order the patriotic pyrotechnics for the next day. No wonder that Mrs. Wayt’s eyes were furtive and anxious, that there were crow’s feet in the corners, and bistre rings about them after that July night’s work! No wonder that the less hardened and less culpable sister-in-law shunned church services!