ing with Ellen, and she doesn't want to stay. She wants
to go." His wife took advantage of Kenton's mute amaze (in the nervous
vagaries even of the women nearest him a man learns nothing from
experience) to put her own interpretation on the case, which, as it was
creditable to the girl's sense and principle, he found acceptable if not
imaginable. "And if you will take my advice," she ended, "you will go
quietly back to the steamship office and exchange your ticket for the
next steamer, or the one after that, if you can't get good rooms, and
give Ellen time to get over this before she leaves. It will be much
better for her to conquer herself than to run away, for that would
always give her a feeling of shame, and if she decides before she goes,
it will strengthen her pride and self-respect, and there will be less
danger--when we come back."

"Do you think he's going to keep after her!"

"How can I tell? He will if he thinks it's to his interest, or he can
make anybody miserable by it."

Kenton said nothing to this, but after a while he suggested, rather
timorously, as if it were something he could not expect her to approve,
and was himself half ashamed of, "I believe if I do put it off, I'll
run out to Tuskingum before we sail, and look after a little matter of
business that I don't think Dick can attend to so well."

His wife knew why he wanted to go, and in her own mind she had already
decided that if he should ever propose to go, she should not gainsay
him. She had, in fact, been rather surprised that he had not proposed
it before this, and now she assented, without taxing him with his real
motive, and bringing him to open disgrace before her. She even went
further in saying: "Very well, then you had better go. I can get on very
well here, and I think it will leave Ellen freer to act for herself if
you are away. And there are some things in the house that I want, and
that Richard would be sure to send his wife to get if I asked him, and
I won't have her rummaging around in my closets. I suppose you will want
to go into the house?"

"I suppose so," said Renton, who had not let a day pass, since he left
his house, without spending half his homesick time in it. His wife
suffered his affected indifference to go without exposure, and trumped
up a commission for him, which would take him intimately into the house.

IV

The piety of his son Richard had maintained the place at Tuskingum in
perfect order outwardl