He did not try to caress her. She would not have permitted it had he tried. In her mind there was fast forming the idea that he was a weak reed to lean upon—that her idol was falling from its pedestal, and there was a constraint in her voice and manner as she bade him good-by and went to her father, who was growing delirious and talking of stocks, and prison, and a dead face with a bullet in the brain. This she did not understand, unless it referred to his thought to kill himself. The prison she understood, and tried to soothe and quiet him by saying he would never go there—that she would save him from it. How she could do it she scarcely knew. There seemed to be but one way. She must face that night session alone, and beg them to spare her father. It was a terrible ordeal, and she shrank from it with inexpressible dread, for she must do it, and her resolution was kept up by the news Nancy Sharp brought her at intervals during the day of the arrangements making for the session and the intensity of feeling among the people as the sense of their losses grew upon them. “Don’t tell me any more, or I shall go crazy, and I need all my wits about me,” Louie cried at last when Nancy came late in the afternoon with more harassing details of what was being done in town. “I done my best to shet ’em up,” Nancy said, “but land’s sake, ’tain’t no use. They are jest ravin’. But I’d like to see ’em try to take your father, sick as he is. They’d walk over my body fust, and I told ’em so, but they jest laughed in my face, and that sneak of a Sheldon said it was all very well for me, a preferred creditor, to feel that way, but if I’d lost all he had I’d talk out of ‘tother side of my mouth. The hound! He’s settin’ ’em on.” Nancy was doing her duty religiously, and had been in two or three fights with boys and innumerable quarrels with others in her zeal to defend the Greys. And Louie knew it, and while she felt grateful for the old woman’s kindness, she grew sick at heart and more and more nervous as she thought of what she must do, and wondered how she could face a set of men as excited and determined as Nancy represented them to be. She had known them all as friends, and to meet them now as enemies was hard to do, but she must do it. As the sun went down a heavy rain began to fall, and the night closed in dark and stormy, with gusts of wind which shook the house and bent the trees and shrubs in the yard, breaking some of the smaller limbs and scattering the leaves in showers. It was a wild night for any woman to be out, and much less for a young girl like Louie. Her wheel was sold, and, though the horses were still in the stable, she dared not take them out, for Nancy Sharp had brought her rumors of stones and eggs laid up for the carriage, should it appear in the street. She must walk and go alone, for the one servant who had not left them must stay with her father and mother, and she would not take Nancy with her.