It pained Marley to hear Powell berate Macochee; he had never heard him rage so violently at the town, though he was always sneering at it. To Marley the very name of Macochee meant romance; he liked the name the Indian village had left behind when it vanished; he liked the old high-gabled buildings about the Square; he longed to identify himself with Macochee, to think of it as his home.
"But I'll tell you one thing," Powell went on, his tone suddenly changing to one of angry resolution as he flung his feet heavily to the bare floor and struck his desk a startling blow with his fist, "I'll tell you one thing, I'm through working for nothing; they've got to pay me! I'm going to squeeze the last cent out of them after this, same as old Dudley does, same as old Bill Blair did before he went on the bench; that's what I'm going to do. I'm getting old and I've got to quit running a legal eleemosynary institution."
Powell's eyes flamed, but a shadow fell in the room, and Powell and Marley glanced at the door.
An old woman, bareheaded in the hurry of a crisis, was on the threshold.
"Oh, Mr. Powell," she began in a wailing voice, "would you come quick!"
"Got any money?" demanded Powell, in the angry resolution of a moment before. He clenched his fist again on the edge of his table. Marley glanced at him in surprise, and then at the old woman.
"Well, you know--I hain't just now, but by the week's end, when I get the money for my washin'--"
"Oh, that's all right," said Powell, getting to his feet, "that's all right. We won't talk of that now. I beg your pardon. We'll walk down to the calaboose and see the boy; we can talk it over with him and see what's to be done."
He picked up his slouch hat and clapped it on his head.
"What's he been doing this time?" he said to the old woman as they went out the door.
Marley watched them as they passed the open window and disappeared. A smile touched his lips an instant, and then he became serious and depressed once more.
He had had no word from Lavinia, and her going away immediately after his scene with Judge Blair confused him. He tried to think it out, but he could reach no conclusion save that it was all at an end. Lavinia's sudden, unexplained departure proved that. And yet he could not, he would not, think that she had changed; no, her father had borne her away--that was it--forcibly and cruelly borne her away. For a long while he sat there finding a certain satisfaction in the melancholy that came over him, and then suddenly he was aroused by the boom of the town clock. The heavy notes of the bell rolled across to him, and he counted them--five. It was time to go. And Powell had not returned. It was not surprising; Powell often went out that way and did not come back, and, often, somehow to Marley's chagrin, men and women sat and waited long hours in the dumb patience of the poor and then went away with their woes still burdening them. They must have been used to woes, they carried them so silently.