and he and his wife had carefully guarded against the carrying of a hoe
through the house, for fear "somebody might die." Now, the preaching of
the elder impressed him powerfully. His life had always been not so much
a bad one as a cowardly one, and to get into heaven by a six months'
repentance, seemed to him a good transaction. Besides he remembered that
there men were never married, and that there, at last, Abigail would no
longer have any peculiar right to torture him. Hankins could not have
ciphered him into Millerism if his wife had not driven him into it as
the easiest means of getting a divorce. No doom in the next world could
have alarmed him much, unless it had been the prospect of continuing
lord and master of Mrs. Abigail. And as for that oppressed woman, she
was simply scared. She was quite unwilling to admit the coming of the
world's end so soon. Having some ugly accounts to settle, she would fain
have postponed the payday. Mrs. Anderson might truly have been called a
woman who feared God--she had reason to.

And as for August, he would not have cared much if the world had come to
an end, if only he could have secured one glance of recognition from the
eyes of Julia. But Julia dared not look. The process of cowing her had
gone on from childhood, and now she was under a reign of terror. She did
not yet know that she could resist her mother. And then she lived in
mortal fear of her mother's heart-disease. By irritating her she might
kill her. This dread of matricide her mother held always over her. In
vain she watched for a chance. It did not come. Once, when her mother's
head was turned, she glanced at August. But he was at that moment
listening or trying to listen to one of Jonas Harrison's remarks. And
August, who did not understand the circumstances, was only able to
account for her apparent coldness on the theory suggested by Andrew's
universal unbelief in women, or by supposing that when she understood
his innocent remark about Andrew's disappointment to refer to her