Maggie
had relieved him, for a moment, of the intensity of this other anxiety.
Now suddenly he was flung back into the very thick of it. His earlier
plan of forcing his father out of all this network of chicanery and
charlatanism now returned. He felt that if he could only seize his
father and forcibly abduct him and take him away from Amy and Thurston
and the rest, and all the associations of the Chapel, he might cure him
and lead him back to health and happiness again.

And yet he did not know. He had not himself escaped from it all by
leaving it, and then that undermining bewildering suspicion that
perhaps after all there was something in all of this, that it was not
only charlatanism, confused and disconcerted him. He was like a man who
hears sounds and faint cries behind a thick wall, and there are no
doors and windows, and the bricks are too stout to be torn apart.

He had been behind that wall all his life ...

Amy's allusion to Maggie in the morning had been very slight, but had
shown quite clearly that she had heard all, and probably more, than the
truth. When he returned that morning he found his mother alone,
knitting a pink woollen comforter, her gold spectacles on the end of
her nose, her fresh lace cap crisp and dainty on her white hair--the
very picture of the dearest old lady in the world.

"Mother," he began at once, "what did Amy mean this morning about
myself and Maggie Cardinal?"

"Maggie who, dear?" his mother asked.

"Maggie Cardinal--the Cardinal niece, you know," he said impatiently.

"Did she say anything? I don't remember."

"Yes, mother. You remember perfectly well. She said that they were all
talking about me and Maggie."

"Did she?" The old lady slowly counted her stitches. "Well, dear, I
shouldn't worry about what they all say--whoever 'they' may be."

"Oh, I don't care for that," he answered contemptuously, "although all
the same I'm not going to have Amy running that girl down. She's been
against her from the first. What I want to know is has Amy been to
father with this? Because if she has I'm going to stop it. I'm not
going to have her bothering father with bits of gossip that she's
picked up by listening behind other peoples' key-holes."

Amy, meanwhile, had come in and heard this last sentence.

"Thank you, Martin," she said quietly.

He turned to her with fury. "What did you mean at breakfast," he asked,
"by what you said about myself and Maggie Cardinal?"

She looke