“No, it isn’t,” he answered. “It will make a deuce of a lot of difference to Medora, but not to him, because he’s the sort that don’t let any outward thing alter their inward disposition. He’s thought it all out. He knows there’s not half a dozen men in the kingdom can make paper like him, and so he’s safe and beyond any punishment whatever he does. He’s done nothing the law can touch him for. And when I touch him, the law will be on his side against me.”
Ned was still amazingly calm. Indeed his self-control astonished her.
“So far I don’t know what’s happening,” he proceeded. “I don’t know where they are, or what they have planned. I’m keeping an open mind. I shall see him presently. I may swing for him yet; or I may find—Lord knows what I may find. It’s all hidden so far.”
“I feel as if I was twenty years older for this news—older and broken too,” said Lydia. “If there was time, I’d weep a river for this, and I shall yet; but not now. There’s a baby coming upstairs, and you can’t think of two things to once and do ’em both justice. I’ll see you to-morrow in the dinner hour. Perhaps you’ll hear more by then. Kellock was a man very nice on speech, as well as manners. He’ll feel it’s up to him to—there, what am I saying?—the strangeness! Well may you say as though you was in a dream. So I feel; and I won’t throw up hope either. God often waits till the very last minute afore He throws the light of truth into a mind. He may prevail with Medora, and so I wouldn’t say nothing yet—nothing to nobody.”
“I’m dazed,” he told her. “I scarce know what I’ve been doing since breakfast. Here’s your children coming back from Sunday school. I’ll be gone. It’s a bad job—an ugly, cruel job; but grasp hold of this tight, and whether you tell or whether you do not tell, remember the fault weren’t mine. I never treated her bad, not yet bullied her, nor played tyrant upon her; and if she said I did, she was a liar; and if ever I handled her rough, I was sorry after; and the worst ever I did weren’t a twentieth part of what she deserved.”
“I know all that,” said Lydia; then the children clattered down the passage with shrill questions: “Be the baby come?” “Be it a boy?” “Oh, say ’tis a boy, Aunt Lydia!”