"Now go to sleep," he enjoined her. "We leave at eight thirty in the morning and scoot straight through Virginia to New York."
CHAPTER XXXIV
One morning, two days after this, Tilly, half ill from worry, was in her room. She heard the sound of wheels below, and, looking from her window, she descried Joel Eperson in his buggy under the spreading branches of a big beech in front of the gate. Her mother and father were at a lawyer's office in the village, where they had gone to conclude the arrangements for the immediate annulment of her marriage. She hastened down the stairs, and went out to the grim, sentinel-like visitor, noting, as she approached him, the tense, wasted expression of his sallow face and the dark splotches about his honest eyes.
"Oh, Joel," she all but sobbed, "I'm so glad you came! Did Martha Jane tell you I wanted to see you?"
"Yes, and I hurried over at once." He had bared his brow, held his broad-brimmed hat in his hand, and had descended to the ground. He took her hand and pressed it reverently and with a sort of shrinking timidity. "I want you to know, Tilly, that if there is anything on earth that I can do I'll willingly do it, if it costs my life. God only knows how I long to help you."
"Oh, Joel, it is awful—awful!" she began, and stopped abruptly.
"Oh, I know— I've heard everything!" he responded, "and it is a beastly outrage. I feel like killing some one. Your father must be insane, and the whole hot-headed mass of hoodlums who are making such a row over nothing at all. I knew about your husband's unfortunate mother and about his religious views, but those were things he could not help, and I could not hold them against him."
"You knew about his mother?" Tilly cried, surprised. "You knew before our marriage?"
Eperson shrugged his gaunt shoulders and transferred his resigned gaze from her face to the still fields. "Yes," he said. "A man who thinks he is a friend of mine, and—and knew of my attentions to you, he had heard it down at Ridgeville and came to me with it shortly after your husband came to Cranston to work. I asked him to drop it, and he did so. I was convinced that your husband was an honorable man and in himself worthy of the love I saw that you were giving him. I am ready to be his friend as well as yours."