‘I will never look on him as Hester’s husband,’ said the attorney.

’I and Fanny have already made up our minds that we would at once ask them to come to us for a month,’ said the barrister.

‘Nothing on earth will induce me to speak to him,’ said the attorney.

‘Then you will be very cruel to Hester,’ said the barrister.

‘It is dreadful to me,’ said the attorney, ’that you should care so little for your sister’s reputation.’  And so they quarrelled.  Robert, leaving the house in great dudgeon, went down on the following morning to Cambridge.

At Puritan Grange the matter was argued rather by rules of religion than of law; but as the rules of law were made by those interested to fit themselves to expediency, so were the rules of religion fitted to prejudice.  No hatred could be more bitter than that which Mrs. Bolton felt for the man whom she would permit no one to call her son-in-law.  Something as to the postage-stamp and the postmarks was told her; but with a woman’s indomitable obstinacy she closed her mind against all that,—­as indeed did also the banker.  ’Is her position in the world to depend upon a postage-stamp?’ said the banker, intending to support his wife.  Then she arose in her wrath, and was very eloquent.  ’Her position in the world!’ she said.  ’What does it matter?  It is her soul!  Though all men and all women should call her a castaway, it would be nothing if the Lord knew her to be guiltless.  But she will be living as an adulteress with an adulterer.  The law has told her that it is so.  She will feel every day and every night that she is a transgressor, and will vainly seek consolation by telling herself that men have pardoned that which God has condemned.’  And again she broke forth.  ’The Queen’s pardon!  What right has the Queen to pardon an adulterer who has crept into the bosom of a family and destroyed all that he found there?  What sense of justice can any Queen have in her bosom who will send such a one back, to heap sin upon sin, to fasten the bonds of iniquity on the soul of my child?’ Postage-stamps and postmarks and an old envelope!  The triviality of the things as compared with the importance of everlasting life made her feel that they were unworthy to be even noticed.  It did not occur to her that the presence of a bodkin might be ample evidence of murder.  Post-marks indeed,—­when her daughter’s everlasting life was the matter in question!  Then they told her of Dick Shand.  She, too, had heard of Dick Shand.  He had been a gambler.  So she said,—­without much truth.  He was known for a drunkard, a spendthrift, a penniless idle ne’er-do-well who had wandered back home without clothes to his back;—­which was certainly untrue, as the yellow trousers had been bought at San Francisco;—­and now she was told that the hated miscreant was to be released from prison because such a one as this was ready to take an oath!  She had a knack of looking on such men,—­ne’er-do-wells