Tom had intended to ride back to Moscow and pay his debt this very evening. But here was a chance to show some little gratitude--a chance to make a beginning of amendment. He did not want to stay at home, where the faces of his mother and Barbara and the pinching economy of the household arrangements would reproach him, but for this very reason he would remain until the next day; it would be a sort of penance, and any self-imposed suffering was a relief. The main use that men make of penitence and the wearing of sackcloth is to restore the balance of their complacency. Tom announced his intention to see to the Sunday wood himself; putting his uncle's horse in the stable, he went manfully to chopping wood in the rain and attending to everything else that would serve to make his mother and sister more comfortable. IV LOCKWOOD'S PLAN George Lockwood, being only mildly malicious, felt something akin to compensation at having procured for Tom so severe a loss. But he was before all things a man secretive and calculating; the first thing he did with any circumstance was to take it into his intellectual backroom, where he spent most of his time, and demand what advantage it could give to George Lockwood. When he had let all the boys out of the store at a quarter past twelve, he locked and barred the door. Then he put away the boxes and all other traces of the company, and carried his tallow candle into his rag-carpeted bedroom, which opened from the rear of the store and shared the complicated and characteristic odors of the shop with a dank smell of its own; this last came from a habit Lockwood had when he sprinkled the floor of the store, preparatory to sweeping it, of extending the watering process to the rag-carpet of the bedroom. His mind gave only a passing thought of mild exultation, mingled with an equally mild regret, to poor Tom Grayson's misfortune. He was already inquiring how he might, without his hand appearing in the matter, use the occurrence for his own benefit. Tom had had presence of mind enough left to beg the whole party in the store to say nothing about the affair; but notwithstanding the obligation which the set felt to protect one another from the old fogies of their families, George Lockwood thought the matter would probably get out. He was not the kind of a man to make any bones about letting it out, if he could thereby gain any advantage. The one feeling in his tepid nature that had ever attained sufficient intensity to keep him awake at night was his passion for Rachel Albaugh; and his passion was quite outside of any interest he might have in Rachel's reversionary certainty of the one-half of John Albaugh's lands. This, too, he had calculated, but as a subordinate consideration.