In the autumn, while all this was going on, I received a painful and wretched letter from Letty Malden, begging me to come to her.  I could not resist such an appeal; and one of Josephine’s little nieces having come to spend the winter with her, I hurried to Slepington,—­not, I am sure, in the least regretted by Mr. Waring, who had begun to look at me with uneasy and sometimes defiant eyes.

I found a miserable household here.  Mr. Malden had in no way reformed.  When did marriage ever reform a bad man?  On the contrary, he was more dissipated than ever; and whenever he came home, the welcome that waited for him was one little calculated to make home pleasant; for Letty’s quick temper blazed up in reproach and reviling that drew out worse recrimination; and even the little, wailing, feeble baby, that filled Letty’s arms and consoled her in his absence, was only further cause of strife between her and her husband.  Often, as I came down the street and saw the pretty outside of the cottage, waving with creepers, and hedged about with thorns, whose gay berries decked it as if for a festival, I thought of what a good old preacher among the Friends once said to me:  “Sarah, thee will live to find shows are often seems; thee sees many a quiet house, with gay windows, that is hell inside.”

I soon found that I must stay all winter at Slepington.  I had a hard task before me,—­to try and teach Letty that she had no right to neglect her own duties because her husband ignored his.  But six months of continual dropping seemed to wear a tiny channel of perception; and my presence, as well as the efforts we made together to preserve order, if not serenity, in the house, restored a certain dim hope to Letty’s mind, and I began to see that the “purification by fire” was doing its work, in slow pain, but to a sure end.

Selfish as it was, I cannot say that I felt sorry to return to Jo, who wrote for me in April, urging me to come as soon as I could, for Mr. Waring had fallen from the mill-wall and broken his leg, and the workmen, in their confusion, had carried him to her house, and she wanted me to help her.  I learned, on reaching Valley Mills, that the new building on the island had not been completed far enough to resist a heavy freshet, that had swept away part of the first story, where the mortar was not yet hardened; and it was in traversing these wet stones to ascertain the extent of the damage that Mr. Waring had slipped, and, unable to recover his footing, fallen on a heap of stones and received his injury.

My first question to Josephine was, “Where is Mr. Waring’s mother?”

“He would not send for her, Sally,” said she, “because she is not well, and he feared to startle her.”

“H’m!” said I, very curtly.

Josephine looked at me with innocent, grave eyes,—­dear, simple child!—­ and yet, for anybody but herself she would have been sufficiently discerning.  This love seemed to have remodelled her nature, to have taken from her all the serpent’s wisdom, to have destroyed her common sense, and distorted her view of everything in which Arthur Waring was concerned.  She had certainly got on very fast in my absence.  I had returned too late.