It was a new experience for even Rhoda to take her reckless audacities with so much seriousness, and she looked up wonderingly, at first with pouting and then with trembling lips. “I don’t see why you want to make me so unhappy at home, when I’m soon going to leave it,” she sobbed. “Do you want to make me hate my home and be glad to go away?” Rhoda longed to take the dainty, drooping little figure into her arms and speak words of soothing. But she held to her purpose. “Do you want to make father, who loves you so much, glad to have you go away?” Charlotte stamped her foot. “Of course I don’t!” she exclaimed, her fists in her eyes. “And you’re perfectly horrid to say such things!” At once Rhoda gave way to compassion, for she felt that she had gained her point. She drew her sister within her arm, patting her shoulder and kissing her forehead. “There, there, dear! Never mind. I only wanted to make sure we could trust you.” In the afternoon when Dr. Ware was ready to make his round of visits, he asked Rhoda to go with him upon a trip he had to make into the country. As they drove through the glistening young spring he told her of his conversation with his morning’s visitor. “Captain Brown gave me permission to talk it over with you,” he said. “I assured him you could be trusted.” Rhoda’s heart swelled with pleasure at her father’s words and at the matter-of-fact way in which he spoke them, for both words and manner made her know how habitual with him their companionship had become. “I’ve known him for a good many years,” Dr. Ware went on, “and I’ve always believed that some day he’d strike a big blow, square on slavery’s head, do some big thing that would help immensely to get rid of it. For a man of Brown’s intelligence, character and personality can’t live half his lifetime absorbed by one idea without making something happen. He and I agree on one point, that slavery can be wiped out only by violence. We both see that its roots have gone so deep that to pull them up will make a terrible upheaval. He hasn’t the faith that I have, hasn’t any, in fact, in political measures and the Republican party. He doesn’t believe, as I do, that all this is helping to keep the roots from spreading and getting stronger, and that it will make our victory quicker and easier, when the time for violence does come.