l consent and knowledge.

Romanzo was summoned with the Company's books to the New York office.
The Colonel seemed to his friends to have aged ten years in seven days.
He wore the look of a man haunted by the premonition of some impending
catastrophe. But he confided his trouble to no one, not even to his
wife. Aurora Googe's friends suffered with her and for her; they began,
at last, to fear for her reason if some definite word should not soon be
forthcoming.

The tension in the Champ-au-Haut household became almost intolerable as
the days passed without any satisfaction as to the fugitive's
whereabouts. After the first shock, and some unpleasant recrimination on
the part of Mrs. Champney, this tension showed itself by silently
ignoring the recent family event. Mrs. Champney found plausible excuse
in the state of her health to see no one. Octavius Buzzby attended to
his daily duties with the face of a man who has come through a severe
sickness; Hannah complained that "he didn't eat enough to keep a cat
alive." His lack of appetite was an accompaniment to sleepless,
thought-racked nights.

Aileen Armagh said nothing--what could she say?--but sickened at her own
thoughts. She made excuse to be on the street, at the station, in The
Gore at the Caukinses', with Joel Quimber and Elmer Wiggins, as well as
among the quarrymen's families, whose children she taught in an
afternoon singing class, in the hope of hearing some enlightening word;
of learning something definite in regard to the probabilities of escape;
of getting some inkling of the whole truth. She gathered a little here,
a little there; she put two and two together, and from what she heard as
a matter of speculation, and from what she knew to be true through Mrs.
Caukins via Romanzo in New York, she found that Champney Googe had
sacrificed his honor, his mother, his friends, and the good name of his
native town for the unlawful love of gain. She was obliged to accept
this fact, and its acceptance completed the work of destruction that the
revelation of Champney Googe's unfaith, through the declaration of a
passion that led to no legitimate consummation in marriage, had wrought
in her young buoyant spirit. She was broken beneath the sudden
cumulative and overwhelming knowledge of evil; her youth found no
abiding-place either for heart or soul. To Father Honore she could not
go--not yet!

* * * * *

On the afternoon of Monday week