"Wait, Joel!" she called out. "You are forgetting these things," and she brought them to him wrapped up in paper. "Give Tilly my love and tell her if the waists don't fit I can take them in or let them out."
"Thank you; you are very, very, kind." Joel had lifted his hat, and, with a hand that seemed bloodless, he took the parcel and put it into his wagon, carefully covering it with his coat. He made no effort toward starting on again, and, as there was an opening for it, Cavanaugh said to his wife:
"I've just been telling him about John, and it seems to me that Joel is sorter worried about—about its effect on Tilly."
Eperson nodded as if acquiescing to a statement too delicate to be discussed, and remained silent, a wilted look of despair on him.
"I see, I see," Mrs. Cavanaugh said. "I was wondering how she would take it. She's never been exactly like other women. Few women would have—have, you know what I mean, Joel—would have acted like she has all along in regard to John's mother. I must say, and I know that you will agree with me, that she showed herself to be a wonderfully good Christian woman. Why, sometimes it looked to me like she loved Mrs. Trott more than she did even her own mother. But she's been rewarded—oh, you know she's been gloriously rewarded! Your sweet little wife, Joel, has saved the very soul and body of a lone, lost woman. But you helped—oh yes! if it hadn't been for you she never could have done it. And you deserve your reward, too. In my opinion you have been a man amongst a million in all you have done in that matter."
"I don't deserve your praise, Mrs. Cavanaugh," Eperson sighed. "I did it all for Tilly. She was unhappy till we began to help Mrs. Trott. I saw where the trouble lay, and did a little, that's all."
"And are you worried about how Tilly will take the news about John?" Mrs. Cavanaugh asked, while her husband hung open-mouthed on Eperson's answer.
"I don't know how exactly to make you understand the—the situation," Joel stammered. "But I reckon I may as well say, and be done with it, that—that—" He went no farther, his words piling one upon another on his helpless tongue, his great, tender eyes bulging from their dark-ringed sockets.
"You can't mean that she would be worried about the divorce." Mrs. Cavanaugh feebly came to his assistance. "Sam and I were talking that over. There is no doubt that it was legal in every way. Old Whaley saw to that. Narrow-minded and hard as he was, he acted for the best in that case."
"I see you don't understand." Joel dug the toe of his coarse shoe into a tuft of grass and mechanically pounded it with his heel. "You don't understand, because you don't know Tilly as well as I do. Mrs. Cavanaugh, how can I put it any better than to—to say that—no matter what was done in court, no matter what John Trott did that might be called 'desertion,' Tilly would never have married again if she had thought he was alive. I'd never have dared to ask her to marry me if I hadn't thought he was dead. I believed it—from the bottom of my soul I believed it, and—and, my friends, listen! I got her to believe it. I saw that she doubted it a little, and I worked and worked, and argued and argued, till finally I got her to believe it. But even then I'd have failed if Mrs. Trott hadn't—hadn't helped me. Mrs. Trott believed he was dead, and it was her belief and my talk that finally convinced Tilly. But now what is to be done?"