her father’s severity and changing his mind.  She had rescued him from revenges quite as dear to him as this, at least so far as she understood it, forgetting that her father believed himself to be pursuing the deliberate murderer of his son.  When we have achieved a victory over our own less noble impulses and put the sophistries that misled us behind us, it is impossible to realize that others have not the same vision, the same mind as our own.  Kate had accused Jack of cold-blooded murder.  She had reasoned herself out of that hateful spirit, and, forgetting that her father had not the vital force of love to act as a fulcrum, she could not quite comprehend how difficult it was to shift the wrathful burden in his mind.  She had gone too far to recede now with honor.  Olympia had trusted her, had indeed given over into her hands the active work of finding the strangely lost clew of Jack’s whereabouts.  Perhaps for her father’s sake it was better that she should be the instrument.  She might be able to dissemble his intervention, shield him from obloquy—­if, as she feared, he was responsible for anything doubtful.

She knew her father too well to suppose that he would flinch from any measure he had proposed to himself.  She knew that she need not count any further upon her accustomed powers of persuasion.  His own words were final on that score.  If she could only learn his intentions!  If she could be sure that he was ulteriorly shaping events against Jack—­was acquainted with his whereabouts—­she would have known exactly what to do.  But, pilloried in doubt, shackled by the dread of exposing him in some hateful malevolence which would forever disgrace him in the community, she hardly dared stir, though she felt that every hour’s delay was a new peril to Jack in some way.  The more she thought of the scene of the morning, the surer she felt that Jones—­or Mr. Dick, as her father sometimes called him—­was in some way an instrument in the paternal scheme.  If she could but see Jones ten minutes!  Her father, she well knew, had guarded against that.  Whom could she send in her place?  Ah! there was the double check.  She couldn’t expose her father to a stranger; yet if her apprehensions were grounded on anything more substantial than fear, strangers must in time know all.  Could Merry be made use of?  No—­that would not do.  The libertine tone of the invalid, his impudent allusion to herself, convinced Kate that a man must be her agent, if any one were to be.  But what man did she know?  If she sent any of the servants, her father would recognize them, and the attempt fail.  She had trusted Elkins.  He seemed an honest, incurious lad, just the one to be trusted in the business.  She could invent a fable which would satisfy his ready credulity without compromising her father.  It was plain that he was the only resource.  She dressed at once and returned to the Alburn.  Thence she dispatched a note to Elkins, begging him to call at his earliest leisure.  While waiting his return, she wrote a letter to be handed to Jones.  This was a work of no little ingenuity, forced as she was to avoid all allusion to her father and the scene of the morning.  When completed, this stroke of the conspiracy ran: