In the midst of it all Stephen raised his head, for he had been bending over Katie who still clung to him, and asked when the next ship left for England.

“In about three weeks,” answered Col.  Pepperrell, “and we will send out a person competent to make full inquiries; the matter shall be sifted.”

“I shall go,” returned Stephen.  “I shall make the necessary inquiries myself, it will be doing something, and I may find the man.  We need that he should be found, Katie and I.”

Elizabeth drew back still more; some flash of feeling made the blood come hotly to her face for a moment, then fade away again.

Katie looked up, turned her eyes slowly from one to another, finding everywhere the sympathy she sought.

“Go, Stephen, since you will feel better,” she said, “but it’s of no use, I am sure.  I understand now something Master Harwin said to me when he left me.  I did not know then what he meant.  He has taken you away from me forever.”  And with a sob, again she hid her face upon his shoulder.  Then, slowly drawing away from him, she turned to Elizabeth, and in her eyes was something of the fury of a jealous woman mixed with the bitter reproach of friendship betrayed.

“How could you,” she said, “how could you consent to do it?”

She had drawn toward Elizabeth every gaze and every thought in the room; she had pointed out the substitute on whom might be emptied those vials of wrath that the proper object of them had taken care to escape.  Elizabeth heard on all sides of her the whispered, “Yes, how could she do it, how could she consent to do it?” Suddenly she found herself, and herself alone, as it seemed, made responsible for this disaster; for the feeling beginning with Katie seemed to grow, and widen, and widen, like the circles of water into which a stone is thrown, and she was condemned by her friends, by the people who had known her and her father, condemned as false to her friendship, as unwomanly.  Katie she could forgive on account of her misery, but the others!  She stood motionless in a world that she had never dreamed of.  These whispers that her imagination multiplied seemed to roar in her ears.  But innocence and pride kept her erect, and at last made her raise her eyes which had fallen and grown dim under the blow of Katie’s words.  She swept them slowly around the room, turning her head slightly to do it.  Not a look of sympathy met her.  Then, in the pain, a power awoke within her.

“It is no less a disaster to me,” she said.  Her words fell with the weight of truth.  She had kept back her pain, no one thought of pitying her as Katie was pitied, but she was vindicated.

“Does she hate him, do you suppose?” asked Madam Pepperrell in a low tone of Governor Wentworth at her elbow.

“It is not probable she loves him much,” replied that gentleman studying the girl’s haughty face.  “I don’t envy her, on the whole, I don’t envy either of them.”  By George, madam, it is hard.”