of a delicate and difficult duty.  He reached out his hand and greeted Plausaby quietly and courteously and yet solemnly.  Isabel, for her part, perceiving that Plausaby had overheard, did not care to conceal the indignation she felt.  Poor Plausaby, Esq.! the disguise was torn, and he could no longer hide himself.  He sat down and wiped the perspiration from his forehead, and essayed to speak, as before, to the minister, of his anxiety about his poor, dear wife, but he could not do it.  Exert himself as he would, the color would not return to his pallid lips, and he had a shameful consciousness that the old serene and complacent look, when he tried it, was sadly crossed by rigid lines of hard anxiety and shame.  The mask was indeed broken—­the nakedness and villainy could no more be hidden!  And even the voice, faithful and obedient hitherto, always holding the same rhythmical pace, had suddenly broken rein, galloping up and down the gamut in a husky jangling.

“Mr. Plausaby, let us walk,” said Lurton, not affecting in the least to ignore Plausaby’s agitation.  They walked in silence through the village out to the prairie.  Plausaby, habitually a sham, tried, to recover his ground.  He said something about his wife’s not being quite sane, and was going to caution Lurton about believing anything Mrs. Plausaby might say.

“Mr. Plausaby,” said Lurton, “is it not better to repent of your sins and make restitution, than to hide them?”

Plausaby cleared his throat and wiped the perspiration from his brow, but he could not trust his voice to say anything.

It was vain to appeal to Plausaby to repent.  He had saturated himself in falsehood from the beginning.  Perhaps, after all, the saturation had began several generations back, and unhappy Plausaby, born to an inheritance of falsehood, was to be pitied as well as blamed.  He was even now planning to extort from his vacillating wife a written statement that should contradict any confession of hers to Isa and Lurton.

Fly swiftly, pen!  For Isa Marlay knew the stake in this game, and she did not mean that any chance of securing Charlton’s release should be neglected.  She knew nothing of legal forms, but she could write a straight-out statement after a woman’s fashion.  So she wrote a paper which read as follows: 

“I do not expect to live long, and I solemnly confess that I took the land-warrant from Smith Westcott’s letter, for which my son Albert Charlton is now unjustly imprisoned in the penitentiary, and I did it without the knowledge of Albert, and at the instigation of Thomas Plausaby, my husband.”

This paper Isa read to Mrs. Plausaby, and that lady, after much vacillation, signed it with a feeble hand.  Then Isabel wrote her own name as a witness.  But she wanted another witness.  At this moment Mrs. Ferret came in, having an instinctive feeling that a second visit from Lurton boded something worth finding out.  Isa took her into Mrs. Plausaby’s room and told her to witness this paper.