id
not give up her liberty of action when she married. She was young yet,
and should enjoy herself if she chose, and in her own way.

This was all the satisfaction Mrs. Markham could get, and supremely
pitying "her poor boy," whom she mentally decided was "henpecked," she
took the cars back to Olney, saying to Richard, who accompanied her to
the train, "I am sorry for you from the bottom of my heart. It would be
better if you had stayed with me."

Richard liked his mother's good opinion, but as he walked back to the
hotel he could not help feeling that a mother's interference between man
and wife was never very discreet, and he wished the good woman had
stayed at home. If he had said so to Ethelyn, when on his return to his
rooms he found her weeping passionately, there might have come a better
understanding between them, and she probably would have stayed with him
that evening instead of attending the whist party given by Mrs. Miller.
But he had fully determined to keep silent, and when Ethelyn asked if
she was often to be subjected to such insults, he did not reply. He went
with her, however, to Mrs. Miller's, and knowing nothing of cards,
almost fell asleep while waiting for her, and playing backgammon with
another fellow-sufferer, who had married a young wife and was there
on duty.

Mrs. Markham, senior, did not go to Camden again, and when Christmas
came, and with it an invitation for Richard and his wife to dine at the
farmhouse on the turkey Andy had fattened for the occasion, Ethelyn
peremptorily declined; and as Richard would not go without her, Mrs.
Jones and Melinda had their seats at table, and Mrs. Markham wished for
the hundredth time that Richard's preference had fallen on the latter
young lady instead of "that headstrong piece who would be his ruin."

CHAPTER XX

THE CRISIS

It was the Tuesday before Lent. The gay season was drawing to a close,
for Mrs. Howard and Mrs. Miller, who led the fashionable world of Camden
before Ethelyn's introduction to it, were the highest kind of
church-women, and while neglecting the weightier matters of the law
were strict to bring their tithes of mint, and anise, and cummin. They
were going to wear sackcloth and ashes for forty days and stay at home,
unless, as Mrs. Miller said to Ethelyn, they met occasionally in each
other's house for a quiet game of whist or euchre. There could be no
harm in that, particularly if they abstained on Fridays, as of course
the