Their failure to pay the interest gave the Judge added reason for pushing the payment of the debt. Everything had been done in regular legal form. Deborah and Denny must go the next day. The widow had exhausted every resource; promises and pleadings were useless, and it was only at the last hour that she had given up. "But have you no relatives, Mrs. Mulhall, who could help you? No friends? Perhaps Dr. Oldham--" Deborah shook her head. "There's only me an' Brother Mike in the family," she said. "Mike's a brick-layer an' would give the coat off his back for me, but he's movin' about so over the country, bein' single, you see, that I can't get a letter to him. I did write to him where I heard from him last, but me letter come back. He don't write often, you see, thinkin' Denny an' me is all right. I ain't seen him since he was here to help put poor Jack away." For a few minutes the silence in the little room was broken only by poor Deborah's sobs, and by Denny's voice, as he tried to comfort his mother. Suddenly the nurse sprang to her feet. "There is some one," she cried. "I knew there must be, of course. Why didn't we think of him before?" Deborah raised her head, a look of doubtful hope on her tear-wet face. "Mr. Matthews," explained the young woman. Deborah's face fell. "But, child, the minister's away with the Doctor. An' what good could he be doin' if he was here, I'd like to know? He's that poor himself." "Oh, I don't know what he'd do, but I know he'd do something. He's that kind of a man," declared the nurse, with such conviction that, against their judgment, Deborah and Denny took heart. "And he's not so far away but that he can be reached," added Hope. That afternoon the dilapidated old hack from Corinth to Gordon's Mills carried a passenger. CHAPTER XXVIII. A FISHERMAN "'Humph!' grunted the other, 'I've noticed that there's a lot of unnecessary things that have to be done.'" In the crisis of Deborah's trouble, Hope had turned to Dan impulsively, as the one woman turns to the one man. When she was powerless in her own strength to meet the need she looked confidently to him. But now that she was actually on the way to him, with Corinth behind and the long road over the hills and through the forests before, she had time to think, while the conscious object of her journey forced itself on her thinking.