“You are right,” she said. “It isn’t fair that he should keep us shivering and shaking and make our days unhappy and our nights a terror. Go to Ashwater. Tell this Albert Rich what you think is necessary. I can’t see that you need to go into full detail. Make him understand only what is essential.” “All right,” said Marcia, “I’m going.” Nancy put the kettle to boil and brewed a cup of strong tea while Marcia was dressing, for it could be seen that she was labouring under heavy mental strain. Nancy followed her to the corner where Marcia took the daily omnibus that ran between the two towns. She kissed her good-bye and clung to her hands with a reassuring grip. After she had gone back to the shop, she condemned herself that she had allowed Marcia to go alone. She felt niggardly. Why did people let their fear of losing a few pennies intervene when matters concerning their hearts and their souls were at stake? What was money that it should make such dreadful things of men and women? After all, men had made money; it was an emanation of their brain. It was not one of the things that God had made. It was an invention by which man, himself, had put upon his soul such shackles as the Almighty never would have imposed. She wondered why she had not locked the door and let people think what they would. Was there any woman in Bluffport who needed a hat so badly that she could not have waited one day while Nancy sat beside Marcia and gave her the comfort of the grip of her hand, the sound of her voice, the chance to say a word here and there that might have distracted her mind from its burden? Nancy sat trying to think how she would feel if her soul were stained with the red secret that she realized never ceased to burn and to eat into the consciousness of her friend. And because she was her friend, and because she had learned to love Marcia as she loved no one else, the big tears rolled down her cheeks and several times that day she sewed their stains under deftly folded velvet. When Marcia stepped from the omnibus at the courthouse corner in Ashwater, she realized that some disaster had overtaken the town. Here and there she saw women weeping and wringing their hands. Little children scuttled past with terrified faces. Half-grown boys went running in one direction, their faces small mirrors of their elders’, their arms loaded with sticks, with bricks, with stones. Men hurried past, some of them carrying antiquated firearms on their shoulders, flintlocks, and old army muskets; some of them with guns of modern make, with revolvers; and there were men in that crowd who carried a grubbing hoe, the blade of a scythe, a hickory “knockmaul,” or an axe.