From the conclave which was held on Saturday at Puritan Grange to decide what should be done, it was impossible to exclude Mrs. Bolton.  She was the young mother’s mother, and how should she be excluded?  From the first moment in which something of the truth had reached her ears, it had become impossible to silence her or to exclude her.  To her all those former faults would have been black as vice itself, even though there had been no question of a former marriage.  Outside active sins, to which it may be presumed no temptation allured herself, were abominable to her.  Evil thoughts, hardness of heart, suspicions, unforgivingness, hatred, being too impalpable for denunciation in the Decalogue but lying nearer to the hearts of most men than murder, theft, adultery, and perjury, were not equally abhorrent to her.  She had therefore allowed herself to believe all evil of this man, and from the very first had set him down in her heart as a hopeless sinner.  The others had opposed her,—­because the man had money.  In the midst of her shipwreck, in the midst of her misery, through all her maternal agony, there was a certain triumph to her in this.  She had been right,—­right from first to last, right in everything.  Her poor old husband was crushed by the feeling that they had, among them, allowed this miscreant to take their darling away from them,—­that he himself had assented; but she had not assented; she was not crushed.  Before Monday night all Cambridge had heard something of the story, and then it had been impossible to keep her in the dark.  And now, when the conclave met, of course she was one.  The old man was there, and Robert Bolton, and William the barrister, who had come down from London to give his advice, and both Mr. and Mrs. Daniel.  Mrs. Daniel, of all the females of the family, was the readiest to endure the severity of the step-mother, and she was now giving what comfort she could by her attendance at the Grange.

‘Of course she should come home,’ said the barrister.  Up to this moment no one had seen Hester since the evil tidings had been made known; but a messenger had been sent out to Folking with a long letter from her mother, in which the poor nameless one had been implored to come back with her baby to her old home till this matter had been settled.  The writer had endeavoured to avoid the saying of hard things against the sinner; but her feelings had been made very clear.  ’Your father and brothers and all of us think that you should come away from him while this is pending.  Nay; we do not hesitate to say that it is your bounden duty to leave him.’

’I will never, never leave my dearest, dearest husband.  If they were to put my husband into gaol I would sit at the door till they had let him out.’  That, repeated over and over again, had been the purport of her reply.  And that word ‘husband,’ she used in almost every line, having only too clearly observed that her mother had not used it at all.  ‘Dearest mother,’ she said, ending her letter, ’I love you as I have always done.  But when I became his wife, I swore to love him best.  I did not know then how strong my love could be.  I have hardly known till now, when he is troubled, of what devotion I was capable.  I will not leave him for a moment,—­unless I have to do so at his telling.’