missed them; perhaps, under her spiritual
passion, she was piqued that earthly passion was so readily silenced.
But, if she was, she did not know it. She was entirely sincere
and intensely happy in a new experience. It was a long winter of
argument;--and then suddenly, in early April, the break came....

"I WILL go; I have a right to save my soul!"

And he said, very simply, "Well, Athalia, then I'll go, too."

"You? But you don't believe--" And almost in the Bible words he answered
her, "No; but where you go, I will go; where you live, I will live." And
then, a moment later, "I promised to cleave to you, little Tay."

II

THE uprooting of their life took a surprisingly short time. In all those
dark months of argument Lewis Hall had been quietly making plans for
this final step, and such preparation betrayed his knowledge from the
first of the hopelessness of his struggle--indeed, the struggle had only
been loyalty to a lost cause. His calm assent to his wife's ultimatum
left her a little blank; but in the immediate excitement of removal, in
the thrill of martyrdom that came with publicity, the blankness did not
last. What the publicity was to her husband she could not understand.
He received the protests of his family in stolid silence; when the
venturesome great-aunt told him what she thought of him, he smiled;
when his brother informed him that he was a fool, he said he shouldn't
wonder. When the minister, egged on by distracted Hall relatives,
remonstrated, he replied, respectfully, that he was doing what he
believed to be his duty, "and if it seems to be a duty, I can't help
myself; you see that, don't you?" he said, anxiously. But that was
practically all he found to say; for the most part he was silent.
Athalia, in her absorption, probably had not the slightest idea of the
agonies of mortification which he suffered; her imagination told her,
truly enough, what angry relatives and pleasantly horrified neighbors
said about her, and the abuse exhilarated her very much; but her
imagination stopped there. It did not give her the family's opinion of
her husband; it did not whisper the gossip of the grocery-store and the
post-office; it did not repeat the chuckles or echo the innuendoes:

"So Squire Hall's wife's got tired of him? Rather live with the Shakers
than him!" "I like Hall, but I haven't any sympathy with him," the
doctor said; "what in thunder did he let her go gallivanting off to
visit the Shake