the
beds; and she sent the two servants away to church as soon as they had
eaten their breakfast, telling them that she would wash their dishes.
Throughout the morning her father and mother heard her about the work
of getting dinner, with certain silences which represented the moments
when she stopped and stood stock-still, and then, readjusting her
burden, forced herself forward under it again.

They sat alone in the family room, out of which their two girls seemed
to have died. Lapham could not read his Sunday papers, and she had no
heart to go to church, as she would have done earlier in life when in
trouble. Just then she was obscurely feeling that the church was
somehow to blame for that counsel of Mr. Sewell's on which they had
acted.

"I should like to know," she said, having brought the matter up,
"whether he would have thought it was such a light matter if it had
been his own children. Do you suppose he'd have been so ready to act
on his own advice if it HAD been?"

"He told us the right thing to do, Persis,--the only thing. We
couldn't let it go on," urged her husband gently.

"Well, it makes me despise Pen! Irene's showing twice the character
that she is, this very minute."

The mother said this so that the father might defend her daughter to
her. He did not fail. "Irene's got the easiest part, the way I look
at it. And you'll see that Pen'll know how to behave when the time
comes."

"What do you want she should do?"

"I haven't got so far as that yet. What are we going to do about
Irene?"

"What do you want Pen should do," repeated Mrs. Lapham, "when it comes
to it?"

"Well, I don't want she should take him, for ONE thing," said Lapham.

This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Lapham as to her husband, and she said in
defence of Corey, "Why, I don't see what HE'S done. It's all been our
doing."

"Never mind that now. What about Irene?"

"She says she's going to Lapham to-morrow. She feels that she's got to
get away somewhere. It's natural she should."

"Yes, and I presume it will be about the best thing FOR her. Shall you
go with her?"

"Yes."

"Well." He comfortlessly took up a newspaper again, and she rose with a
sigh, and went to her room to pack some things for the morrow's journey.

After dinner, when Irene had cleared away the last trace of it in
kitchen and dining-room with unsparing punctilio, she came downstairs,
dressed to go out, and bade her father come to walk with her ag