"God bless you for all!" said Mary. "Kiss me before I go—my more than sister."
"Just what I was going to ask of you," said Joe Harris, who had great faith, and was not ashamed to own the fact, in the magnetism of the lips. The kiss was exchanged, with a warm embrace as an accompaniment, and then Mary Crawford said:
"I must go at once, before I am missed and too much wonder excited. I will try to obey all your directions. I shall see you again?—you will not leave West Falls until—until—"
"Until you are safe? No! Not if I stay a month!" was the reply. "If that letter fails, something else shall not! Good-bye, and let me hear from you to-morrow, or even to-day if anything occurs. But remember, no marriage to-night, if you have to run away here to escape it!"
"Oh, no! no! no! Good-bye!" and the young girl had passed out of the door and into the street, bearing the second letter which had that day left the little house for the great one on the hill, and bearing—oh, what a terrible change in knowledge and feeling since she had entered the door less than an hour before! Her brain throbbed almost to bursting, and every nerve in her body seemed to be strung to an unendurable tension, as she left the little gate and took her way homeward. She was wretched, in the knowledge of guilt and wrong which had been imparted to her, and in the fear of the future, which she could not shake away; but she confided, spite of herself, in the counsel which had been given her, and there was a happiness out-weighing all the misery, in the knowledge that the idol of her young heart was not a base and miserable counterfeit. The gulf between Richard Crawford and herself might have grown too wide to be over-leaped—she might have become, to him, only a name to be regretted and yet despised—but it was still something in life to know that he was true and worthy, even if he was to be nothing more to her; and the foot of the young girl trod more firmly upon the green sward of the pathway than it had done for many a long month, and half the languor was gone from eye and nerve, as she walked slowly homeward through the summer noon, to try that strange experiment upon which she felt that the happiness or misery of her whole future life might depend.
As for Josephine Harris, those who know the depressions which sometimes fall upon high nervous organizations after severe and continued effort, scarcely need be told that she was almost prostrated the moment she felt that her work was for the time concluded. She had been suffering with throbbing temples and a too-rapid motion about the heart, during a large part of her conversation with Mary Crawford; and when Aunt Betsey, seeing from the window the departure of Mary, and little Susan, recalled by the voice of her cousin, re-entered the sitting-room, they found Joe shedding tears like a great baby and sobbing a little, with a fair prospect of an afternoon and night in the company of that most unromantic of companions—sick-headache.
It is a matter of no consequence how much of the conversation which had just passed, Josephine narrated to her aunt and cousin. Enough to satisfy their proper curiosity and give them assurance that she had succeeded in her attempt at first alarming and then winning the confidence of the young girl, and nothing more. Neither asked more, for both felt, beyond a doubt, that there might have been confidences in that conversation, too sacred to be revealed to other ears.
The sick-headache did come, as it had promised; and Joe Harris, her temples bathed with cologne by the willing hands of little Susy, went up to an enforced siesta in her little bed-room. But she had the satisfaction, as the drowsy hum of the summer afternoon gradually lulled her into slumber, of saying to herself—the best of all auditors for those who have sound hearts and clear consciences:
"I thought I would do it—I meant to do it—and may I never play detective again if I don't believe that I have done it!"