"That is true," said Mrs. Munger. "I wonder what Mr. Putney will have to say to all this. Can he feel that _his_ skirts are quite clean, acting that way, as the family counsel of the Northwicks, after all he used to say against him?" Mr. Gerrish expressed his indifference by putting up a roll of muslin on the shelf while he rejoined, "I care very little for the opinions of Mr. Putney on any subject." In some places Mrs. Munger encountered a belief, which she did not discourage, that the Northwick girls had known all along that their father was alive, and had been in communication with him; through Putney, most probably. In the light of this conjecture the lawyer's character had a lurid effect, which it did not altogether lose when Jack Wilmington said, bluntly, "What of it? He's their counsel. He's not obliged to give the matter away. He's obliged to keep it." "But isn't it very inconsistent," Mrs. Munger urged, "after all he used to say against Mr. Northwick?" "I suppose it's a professional, not a personal matter," said Wilmington. "And then, their putting on mourning! Just think of it!" Mrs. Munger appealed to Mrs. Wilmington, who was listening to her nephew's savagery of tone and phrase with the lazy pleasure she seemed always to feel in it. "Yes. Do you suppose they meant it for a blind?" "Why, that's what people think now, don't they?" "Oh, _I_ don't know. What do _you_ think, Jack?" "I think they're a pack of fools!" he blurted out, like a man who avenges on the folly of others the hurt of his own conscience. He cast a look of brutal contempt at Mrs. Munger, who said she thought so, too. "It is too bad the way people allow themselves to talk," she went on. "To be sure, Sue Northwick has never done anything to make herself loved in Hatboro'--not among the ladies at least." Mrs. Wilmington gave a spluttering laugh, and said, "And I suppose it's the ladies who allow themselves to talk as they do. I can't get the men in my family to say a word against her." Jack scowled his blackest. "It would be a pitiful scoundrel that did. Her misfortunes ought to make her sacred to every one that has the soul of a man." "Well, so it does. That is just what I was saying. The trouble is that they don't make her sacred to every one that has the soul of a woman," Mrs. Wilmington teased. "I know it doesn't," Jack returned, in helpless scorn, as he left Mrs. Munger alone to his aunt. "_Do_ you suppose he still cares anything for her?" Mrs. Munger asked, with cosey confidentiality. "Who knows?" Mrs. Wilmington rejoined, indolently. "It would be very poetical, wouldn't it, if he were to seize the opportunity to go back to her?" "Beautiful!" sighed Mrs. Munger. "I do _like_ a manly man!"