" John
said to Dora, as the man moved a small table up to her bedside and
rested the tray on it. "You must not go to bed on an empty stomach, and
this is just light enough to make you sleep soundly."

The sight of the food, which was attractively served, appealed to the
child, and when the man had left the room, John propped her up with the
pillow and put the tray into her lap. She ate heartily, and when she had
finished he set the tray aside.

"Now go to sleep," he enjoined her. "We leave at eight thirty in the
morning and scoot straight through Virginia to New York."

CHAPTER XXXIV

One morning, two days after this, Tilly, half ill from worry, was in her
room. She heard the sound of wheels below, and, looking from her window,
she descried Joel Eperson in his buggy under the spreading branches of a
big beech in front of the gate. Her mother and father were at a lawyer's
office in the village, where they had gone to conclude the arrangements
for the immediate annulment of her marriage. She hastened down the
stairs, and went out to the grim, sentinel-like visitor, noting, as she
approached him, the tense, wasted expression of his sallow face and the
dark splotches about his honest eyes.

"Oh, Joel," she all but sobbed, "I'm so glad you came! Did Martha Jane
tell you I wanted to see you?"

"Yes, and I hurried over at once." He had bared his brow, held his
broad-brimmed hat in his hand, and had descended to the ground. He took
her hand and pressed it reverently and with a sort of shrinking
timidity. "I want you to know, Tilly, that if there is anything on earth
that I can do I'll willingly do it, if it costs my life. God only knows
how I long to help you."

"Oh, Joel, it is awful--awful!" she began, and stopped abruptly.

"Oh, I know-- I've heard everything!" he responded, "and it is a beastly
outrage. I feel like killing some one. Your father must be insane, and
the whole hot-headed mass of hoodlums who are making such a row over
nothing at all. I knew about your husband's unfortunate mother and
about his religious views, but those were things he could not help, and
I could not hold them against him."

"You knew about his mother?" Tilly cried, surprised. "You knew before
our marriage?"

Eperson shrugged his gaunt shoulders and transferred his resigned gaze
from her face to the still fields. "Yes," he said. "A man who thinks he
is a friend of mine, and--and knew of my attentions to you, he had heard
it