And with this Thy-will-be-done she accepted her fate. She was used to being denied her prayers. She turned and moved across the grass toward the gate. She paused once or twice to look back, as if hoping that he would relent. RoBards gazed at her with profound pity, but he could not grant her plea. Finding that he would not beckon her to return, Mrs. Lasher nodded, slipped through the gate, and moved on to what must be almost the funeral of her boy. She left RoBards in as much confusion as his benumbed spirit could feel. The reptile Jud had evidently told his mother only a part of the story. He had remembered enough to lie about the cause of his punishment. But how long could he be trusted to keep the rest concealed? Who could keep a secret? Immy’s pitiful future was already at the mercy of her own babbling, of her little brother’s wondering, of the farmer’s wife who loved gossip, and of twist-wit Jud. RoBards was afraid even of his own power to keep it inviolate. Suppose he himself talked in his sleep and Patty heard him? Suppose that in one of his wild tempers, when wrath like a drunkenness made him eager to fling off all decencies and rave in insults, he should hurl this truth at Patty or someone else? In many of the rocks on the farm the roots of trees had made little rifts and squeezed and squirmed and grown until they split granite asunder. What heart could withstand the relentless pressure, from the irresistible gimleting of a secret? Once the truth was uttered, it could no more be recalled than the dead itself. It was cruelly easy in this world to do, to say, to think; and hideously impossible to undo, unsay, unthink. One could only add repentance and remorse to guilt or carelessness. Repentance and remorse were dangerous, too, to the soul, for one could repent a good deed, a mercy, an abstention as easily as evil. He found now in his conscience nothing but regret that he had let that filthy serpent crawl away. The copperhead had struck and he had merely bruised it and left it alive with all its venom, and the forked tongue and hissing of gossip. In this room he had sorely repented two deeds of pity: sparing Chalender’s life and Jud Lasher’s. What a poltroon thing pity was, after all! The next day he rode over to White Plains and found a letter from Patty among his mail. He read it on the way home, letting the reins lie in the mane of the horse while he conned the pages. They were dashed off in a mood of girlish hilarity. New York was a fountain of renewing youth to her. It had grown enormously, she said, since she left it a few months ago. The railroad journey was a sensational adventure. Like most of the other passengers, she had been fairly choked with smoke and riddled with cinders and one of them had stuck in her eye a long while. But New York with even half an eye was heaven.