It was nearly daylight when Andrew and August and Julia reached the castle.  The Philosopher advised Julia to go home, and for the present to let the marriage be as though it were not.  August dreaded to see Julia returned to her mother’s tyranny, but Andrew was urgent in his advice, and Julia said that she must not leave her mother in her trouble.  Julia reached home a little after daylight, and a little before Mrs. Anderson was brought home in a fit of hysterics.

Poor Mrs. Abigail still hoped that the end of the world for which she had so fondly prepared would come, but as the days wore on she sank into a numb despondency.  When she thought of the loss of her property, she groaned and turned her face to the wall.  And Samuel Anderson sat about the house in a dumb and shiftless attitude, as do most men upon whom financial ruin comes in middle life.  The disappointment of his faith and the overthrow of his fortune had completely paralyzed him.  He was waiting for something, he hardly knew what.  He had not even his wife’s driving voice to stimulate him to exertion.

There was no one now to care for Mrs. Anderson but Julia, for Cynthy had taken up her abode in the log-cabin which Jonas had bought, and a happier housekeeper never lived.  She watched Jonas till he disappeared when he went to work in the morning, she carried him a “snack” at ten o’clock, and headways found her standing “like a picter” at the gate, when he came home to dinner.  But Cynthy Ann generally spent her afternoons at Anderson’s, helping “that young thing” to bear her responsibilities, though Mrs. Anderson would receive no personal attentions now from any one but her daughter.  She did not scold; her querulous restlessness was but a reminiscence of her scolding.  She lay, disheartened, watching Julia, and exacting everything from Julia, and the weary feet and weary heart of the girl almost sank under her burdens.  Mrs. Anderson had suddenly fallen from her position of an exacting tyrant to that of an exacting and helpless infant.  She followed Julia with her eyes in a broken-spirited fashion, as if fearing that she would leave her.  Julia could read the fear in her mother’s countenance; she understood what her mother meant when she said querulously, “You’ll get married and leave me.”  If Mrs. Anderson had assumed her old high-handed manner, it would have been easy for Julia to have declared her secret.  But how could she tell her now?  It would be a blow, it might be a fatal blow.  And at the same time how could she satisfy August?  He thought she had bowed to the same old tyranny again for an indefinite time.  But she could not forsake her parents in their poverty and afflictions.

The fourteenth of August, the day on which possession was to have been given to Bob Walker, came and went, but no Bob Walker appeared.  A week more passed, in which Samuel Anderson could not muster enough courage to go to see Walker, in which Samuel Anderson and his wife waited in a vague hope that something might happen.  And every day of that week Julia had a letter from August, which did not say one word of the trial that it was for him to wait, but which said much of the wrong Julia was doing to herself to submit so long.  And Julia, like her father and mother, was waiting for she knew not what.