"Pha, pha! I'm a foolish old body. Fretting and fuming to no purpose, likely. There's Pratt, now, laughing, down the street. 'Mother, if you're going to have one of your brigazoos with that young parson, I'm off,' he says. He says,--'You're not in your own country, where the Shelbys rule the roast.' What if I'm not, Doctor Blecker? Truth's truth. I'm tired of cant, whether it belongs to the New-England new age of reason, their Humanity and Fourierism and Broad-Church and Free-Love, or what not, or our own Southern hard-bit, tight-reined men's creeds. Not God's,--driving men headlong into one pit, all but a penned-up dozen. I'm going back of all churches to the words of Jesus. There's my platform. But you said you wanted to speak with me. What's _your_ trouble?" Blecker hesitated,--not knowing how this sturdy interpreter of the words of Jesus would look on his marriage with another man's wife, if she understood the matter clearly. He fumbled his cravat a minute, feeling alone, as if the earth and heaven were vacant,--no background for him to lean against. Men usually do stand thus solitary, when they are left to choose by God. "You're hard on the young fellow, Mrs. Sheppard. I wish for my own sake he was a better specimen of his cloth. There's no one else here to marry me." "Tut! no difference what _he_ is,"--growing graver, as she spoke. "God's blessing comes pure, if the lips are not the cleanest that speak it. You are resolved, then, on your course, as you spoke to me last night?" "Yes, I am, if Grey will listen to reason. You and the Colonel leave to-morrow?" "Yes, and she cannot stay here behind me, to a certainty. Pratt is ordered off, and I must go see to my three-year-olds. Morgan will have them before I know what I'm about. I'll take the girl back to Wheeling, so far on her way home. As to this marriage"---- She stopped, with her fingers on her chin. The Doctor laughed to himself. She was deciding on Grey's fate and his, as if they were a pair of her three-year-olds that Government wanted to buy. "It's unseemly, when the child's father is not here. That's how it seems to me, Dr. Blecker. As for love, and that, it will keep. Pha, pha! There's one suggestion of weight in favor of it. If you were killed in battle, the girl would have some provision as your widow that she could not have now. D'ye see?" Blecker laughed uneasily. "I see; you come at the bone of the matter, certainly. I have concluded, Mrs. Sheppard, Grey must go with you; but she shall leave here as my wife. If there is any evil consequence, it shall come to me." There was a moment's silence. He avoided the searching black eyes fixed on his face.