“Your mother, of course, is deeply pleased,” he continued. “I don’t know but it is giving her almost as much pleasure as your marriage would have done. It will be a good thing for Charlotte to be married happily and settled down. She’ll come out all right. I never have had any doubts about her, in the long run, because she’s so much like what her mother was at her age.” Horace Hardaker came often to consult with Rhoda in the preparation of her case. He hoped to make a telling presentment and was enthusiastic over the excitement that already had been aroused. “Of course,” he said to her one day in the early winter, when the date set for her trial was almost at hand, “the law and the facts are all against us. The only thing we can do is to appeal to the sentiment against the law. Whether we lose or win, the affair is making a big breeze that’s going to be bigger yet!” “You know, Horace,” she replied, “that I don’t care in the least what they do with me,--except on mother’s account. What I want most is to help all I can in the fight against slavery and if it will do more good for me to stay in jail than to go home and work with the Underground again, why then--” she looked straight at him and a smile flashed from her lips up into her eyes--“in jail let me stay!” He smiled back at her and his blue eyes lighted with admiration as he laid one hand for a moment over hers. “Rhoda, I’ve told you this before, but I must say it again, and I shall always say it--you’re the grandest girl there is anywhere!” After he was gone she sat with a tender smile on her lips. “Dear Horace!” she was thinking. “Such a good friend as he is! Sound and true to the bottom of his heart! Why didn’t I happen to fall in love with him?... Well, it seems to be getting nearly time--for me to refuse him again!” It was within a day or two of the opening of her trial, which was to be the first of the series, when Rhoda finally brought herself to the point of writing to Jefferson Delavan. Many times she had told herself that, since he was to marry her sister, she ought to let him know that in her heart were only wishes for his happiness. But it had been a hard thing to do and she had postponed it from week to week. At last, her sense of duty would be put off no longer and she resolutely faced the heartache that she knew the task would make all the more poignant.