"Well, you know--I hain't just now, but by the week's end, when I get the money for my washin'--" "Oh, that's all right," said Powell, getting to his feet, "that's all right. We won't talk of that now. I beg your pardon. We'll walk down to the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over with him and see what's to be done." He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on his head. "What's he been doing this time?" he said to the old woman as they went out the door. Marley watched them as they passed the open window and disappeared. A smile touched his lips an instant, and then he became serious and depressed once more. He had had no word from Lavinia, and her going away immediately after his scene with Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it out, but he could reach no conclusion save that it was all at an end. Lavinia's sudden, unexplained departure proved that. And yet he could not, he would not, think that she had changed; no, her father had borne her away--that was it--forcibly and cruelly borne her away. For a long while he sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy that came over him, and then suddenly he was aroused by the boom of the town clock. The heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and he counted them--five. It was time to go. And Powell had not returned. It was not surprising; Powell often went out that way and did not come back, and, often, somehow to Marley's chagrin, men and women sat and waited long hours in the dumb patience of the poor and then went away with their woes still burdening them. They must have been used to woes, they carried them so silently. Marley was walking moodily down Main Street, feeling that he had no part in the bustling happiness of the people going home from their day's work, when, lifting his head, he saw Mrs. Blair in her surrey. Instantly she jerked the horse in toward the curb and beckoned to him. "Why, Glenn! I'm so glad I met you!" she said, her face rosy with its smile. "I have something for you." She raised her eyebrows in a significant way and began fumbling in her lap. Presently she leaned out of the surrey and pressed something into his hand. "Just between ourselves, you know!" she said, with the delicious mystery of a secret, and then gathering up her reins, she clucked at her lazy horse. He looked after her a moment, then at the thick envelope he held in his hand. On it was written in the long Anglican characters of a young girl, these words: "For Glenn." CHAPTER XII A CONDITIONAL SURRENDER Judge Blair and Lavinia returned home Saturday. "I guess it's no use," the judge said to Mrs. Blair when she had followed him up stairs, where he had gone to wash off the dust he had accumulated during the six hours the train had consumed in jerking itself from Sandusky to Macochee.