"What do you mean?"
"I've sent a boy to the penitentiary." Ward felt a kind of relief, the first he had felt all that day, in dealing thus bluntly, thus brutally, with himself. Elizabeth knit her brows, and her eyes winked rapidly in the puzzled expression that came to them.
"You remember Harry Graves?" asked her father.
"Oh, that young man?"
"Yes, that young man. Well, I've sent him to the penitentiary."
"What is that you say, Stephen?" asked Mrs. Ward, coming just then into the room. She had heard his words, but she wished to hear them again.
"I just said I'd sent Harry Graves to the penitentiary."
"For how long?" asked Mrs. Ward, with a judicial desire for all the facts, usually unnecessary in her judgments.
"For one year."
"Why, how easily he got off!" said Mrs. Ward. "And do hurry now, Stephen. You're late."