d Putney. "Why, confound you!" He suddenly brought
his voice down. "Do you mean to tell me the fellow's been back here, and
you didn't let me know?"

"I hadn't any orders to do it," Elbridge weakly urged.

"Orders, the devil!" Putney retorted. "I'd 'a' given a hundred dollars
to see that man and talk with him. Come, now; tell me all you know about
it! Don't miss a thing!" After a few words from Newton, he broke out:
"Found him in the house! And I was down there prowling round the place
myself not three hours before! Go on! Great Scott! Just think of it!"

Putney was at one of those crises of his life when his drink-devil was
besetting him with sore temptation, and for the last twenty-four hours
he had been fighting it with the ruses and pretences which he had
learned to employ against it, but he felt that he was losing the game,
though he was playing for much greater stakes than usual. He had held
out so long since his last spree, that if he lost now he would defeat
hopes that were singularly precious and sacred to him: the hopes that
those who loved him best, and distrusted him most, and forgave him
soonest, had begun to cherish. It would not break his wife's heart; she
was used to his lapses; but it would wring it more cruelly than usual if
he gave way now.

When the fiend thrust him out of his house the night before, he knew
that she knew of it, though she let him go in that fearful company, and
made no effort to keep him. He was so strait an agnostic that, as he
boasted, he had no superstitions even; but his relation to the
Northwicks covered the period of his longest resistance of temptation,
and by a sort of instinctive, brute impulse, he turned his step towards
the place where they lived, as if there might be rescue for him in the
mere vicinity of those women who had appealed to him in their distress,
as to a faithful enemy. His professional pride, his personal honor, were
both involved in the feeling that he must not fail them; their implicit
reliance had been a source of strength to him. He was always hoping for
some turn of affairs which would enable him to serve them, or rather to
serve Adeline; for he cared little for Suzette, or only secondarily; and
since Pinney had gone upon his mission to Canada he was daily looking
for this chance to happen. He must keep himself for that, and not
because of them alone, but because those dearest to him had come tacitly
to connect his resistance of the tempter with his