Not once had she thought of the man’s death as a possible factor in the solution of the problem of her life. Death was something between man and his God only, and she had so come to feel that the All-Powerful was leagued against her, that she had never thought of His making a move in her favour. Well, she had been wrong--she had done God an injustice, and she had apologized for it on her knees. And now she felt that if Providence were really and seriously to be on her side, or at least, as the man who met the grizzly in the open prayed, not on the side of the bear, her future might be all that she could hope it would be. Having asked the forgiveness of God, it was a simple thing now to ask her father to pardon her for the extravagant way in which she had spoken when he had brought to her the news of the man’s death. Mr. Wadhurst was one of those plain-spoken, straightforward men, who think it right and proper to be hypocritical over such matters as death and bankruptcy. He had joined solemnly in the complaints of his unprosperous neighbours over the bad times, and had shaken his head when one of them, who had been going to the wall for years, at last reached that impenetrable boundary of his incapacity; though Mr. Wadhurst did not fail to perceive that he would now be able to join the derelict farm on to his own and obtain the live stock at his own valuation--a chance for which he had been waiting for years. And he had never failed to be deeply shocked when he heard of the death of a drunken wife, or a ne’er-do-weel son, or a consumptive daughter on the eve of her marriage with a scorbutic man; and thus he hoped that God would look upon him as a man with a profound sense of decency. He certainly looked upon himself as such; and he never felt his position stronger in this respect than he did when his daughter met him in a contrite spirit for having spoken with so great a want of delicacy in regard to her rascally husband. “I’m glad that you have come to see that--that vengeance is God’s, not man’s,” said he, with great solemnity. She replied substantially that she was glad it was in such capable hands, though the words that she employed were of conventional acquiescence in the conventionally Divine. “Whatever the man may have been, he died like a man,” resumed her father, repeating the phrase that he had used before. “You must respect his memory for that deed.” She could not help feeling that she would respect his memory more on this account if he had done the deed before she had met him. But she did not express this view. She only bent her head; she was no longer a rebellious child, only a hypocritical one. “It’s a shocking thing--an awful thing!” continued her father. “To think that within a year your mother and your husband have gone. Have you yet grasped the fact that you are a widow, Priscilla?”