covered the lower part of his face, and rose like a spring-tide up his
cheeks, and lent a fierce, congested glare to his eyes. He felt how
woeful and irretrievable a thing it would be for him just then to lose
his countenance, and at the thought the flush burned deeper and merged
higher. It overspread his high, bald, intellectual forehead, and
incarnadined his sconce up to the very top of it. At this moment it was
that Mrs. Kilgore broke off her narrative with the exclamation, "Why,
Joseph, what's the matter?"

At her words it seemed as if every drop of blood in his body poured into
his face. He could endure it no longer. He rose abruptly, strode out of
the parlor, and went to his room, although it was but eight o'clock,
and he had no fire there. If he had staid another moment he must have
brained Silas and his wife with the poker, such an ungovernable anger
boiled up in him with the sense of his causeless, shameful discomfiture.

As Joseph left the parlor the eyes of Silas and his wife met each other,
--his dull with bewilderment and terror at a spectral fear; hers keen
with a definite suspicion. But even her loquacity was subdued by a real
fright. She had nothing to say. Her sensation was like that of one who,
hunting a hare, stumbles upon a wolf. She had been both offended and
made curious by Joseph's demeanor that afternoon, but the horrid idea
that within a moment had been suggested to both their minds had so
little occurred to her as a serious possibility that she was even on the
point of rallying Joseph on it before her husband. Some time after he
had left the parlor Silas asked, with averted face:--

"What was it that he said when you told him the news?" and then she
repeated his words.

And Joseph, sitting wild-eyed upon his bed in the darkness in the room
above, red no longer, but pale as death, heard the murmur of the voices,
and knew that she was telling him. No one of the household slept much
that night, except Mrs. Kil-gore. Whenever she awoke she heard her
husband tossing restlessly, but she dared not ask him what was
the matter. In vain did Silas rehearse to himself all through the
night-hours how petty were the trifles in Joseph's demeanor which
had disturbed him. They were of the sort of trifles which create that
species of certainty known as moral certainty,--the strongest of all
in the mind it occupies, although so incapable of being communicated to
others. It mattered little how much evidence th