incidental. Hence, morally, she had more fat than fibre; and hence
again, though to her mind guilt was horrible, publicity was so much
worse that her first and ruling impulse toward any evil doing not her
own was to conceal it. That was her form of worldliness, the only fault
she felt certain she was free from. And here she was, without a helping
hand or a word of counsel, laboring to hide from the servants and from
the dear Byingtons, from the church and from a scoffing world, the
hideous fact that Isabel was a fugitive from the murderous wrath of a
jealous husband, and that the rector of All Angels had crumbled into
moral ruin.

"And oh," she cried, "is it the worst of it, or is it the best of it,
that in this awful extremity he keeps so sane, so marvellously sane?"
She said this the oftener because every few hours some new sign to the
contrary forced itself upon her notice. Oblivion was her cure-all.

For a while after his conference with Mrs. Morris Arthur made some
feeble show--for her eye alone--of looking after clews, and then, as
much to her joy as to her amazement, told her it was a part of his
detective strategy to return into his study, and seemingly to his
ordinary work, until time would allow certain unfoldings for which he
looked with confidence.

"Have you found out anything?" she asked, with a glaringly false
eagerness that gave him a new panic of suspicion and whetted his
cunning.

He said he had, but must beg her not to ask yet what it was. Then he
inquired if any neighbor had left town that morning for Boston, and her
heart rose into her throat as she marked the subtlety he could not keep