“But it wouldn’t do any good,” was the conclusion to which she had always to come. “For if I were to marry Jeff it would make father bitterly unhappy and he would blame mother for having influenced me to give way. And as long as I don’t marry him mother will keep on feeling that it is father’s fault and being angry with him because of it.” The hiding place for runaway slaves was completed during the stay of Mrs. Ware and Charlotte in Cincinnati, in October. It was a little, narrow room, or cell, long enough for a man to stretch himself at length on the floor and high enough for him to sit upright on a bench. On three sides and across the top, cords of wood for the winter fires were stacked in orderly array. But on the third side, containing the entrance, where there was only a little space between the room and the back wall of the shed, the wood was piled irregularly. From any but a very searching eye these apparently haphazard sticks would conceal the tiny, boarded structure, while in a moment they could be thrown aside and passage in or out made easy. Within, a pile of straw and some old quilts and carriage rugs made a bed comfortable enough, save on the worst of winter nights, for those who had seldom known a better. If a wayfarer gave the four signal knocks on a night too bitterly cold for him to be housed in the woodpile shelter Rhoda, into whose charge her father had given most of the work of conducting their “station,” risked discovery by making some arrangement for him within the house. Once, when the traveler was a man alone, she bedded him for the rest of the night on the lounge in the office, until early morning, when Jim hurried him to the woodshed. Another time, when the suppliants were a husband and wife and little child, a bed was improvised for them in Jim and Lizzie’s room. But, zealously absorbed though she was in this work and convinced that it was righteous and would have a good result, Rhoda was never free from twinges of conscience because it was being carried on without her mother’s knowledge. “It is her home and it isn’t fair for her not to know about it,” she thought, time after time, as the winter went by. “Of course, she wouldn’t like it and it would make her most unhappy to know about it, and it is very dear in father to want to save her the pain of knowing. I know it’s right for us to do it--we must-- Oh, dear! It’s just another of these dreadful knots of right and wrong all mixed up that the North and South have tangled themselves into! And slavery is at the bottom of it all,--and slavery is the thing we must get rid of--tear it all out--no matter--no matter who is hurt!”