Wholesome walked on ahead quickly, and as it seemed plain that he would be alone, we dropped behind.

“What is all this?” said I.  “Does a man grieve thus because he chastises a scoundrel?”

“No,” said Schmidt.  “The Friend Wholesome was, as you may never yet know, an officer of the navy, and when your war being done he comes here.  There is a beautiful woman whom he must fall to loving, and this with some men being a grave disorder, he must go and spoil a good natural man with the clothes of a Quaker, seeing that what the woman did was good in his sight.”

“But,” said I, “I don’t understand.”

“No,” said he; “yet you have read of Eve and Adam.  Sometimes they give us good apples and sometimes bad.  This was a russet, as it were, and at times the apple disagrees with him for that with the new apple he got not a new stomach.”

I laughed a little, but said, “This is not all.  There was something between him and the man he struck which we do not yet know.  Did you see him?”

“Yes, and before this—­last week some time in the market-place.  He was looking at old Dinah’s tub of white lilies when I noticed him, and to me came a curious thinking of how he was so unlike them, many people having for me flower-likeness, and this man, being of a yellow swarthiness and squat-browed, ’minded me soon of the toadstool you call a corpse-light.”

“Perhaps we shall know some time; but here is home, and will he speak of it to Mistress White, do you think?”

“Not ever, I suppose,” said Schmidt; and we went in.

The sight we saw troubled me.  In the little back parlor, at a round mahogany table with scrolled edges and claw toes, sat facing the light Mistress White.  She was clad in a gray silk with tight sleeves, and her profusion of rich chestnut hair, with its willful curliness that forbade it to be smooth on her temples, was coiled in a great knot at the back of her head.  Its double tints and strange changefulness, and the smooth creamy cheeks with their moving islets of roses that would come and go at a word, were pretty protests of Nature, I used to think, against the demure tints of her pearl-gray silken gown.  She was looking out into the garden, quite heedless of the older dame, who sat as her wont was between the windows, and chirruped now and then, mechanically, “Has thee a four-leaved clover?” As I learned some time after, one of our older clerks, perhaps with a little malice of self-comfort at the fall of his senior’s principles, had, on coming home, told her laughingly all the story of the morning.  Perhaps one should be a woman and a Friend to enter into her feelings.  She was tied by a promise and by a sense of personal pledge to a low and disgraced man, and then coming to love another despite herself she had grown greatly to honor him.  She might reason as she would that only a sense of right and a yearning for the fullness of a righteous life had made him give up his profession and fellows and turn aside to follow the harder creed of Fox, but she well knew with a woman’s keenness of view that she herself had gone for something in this change; and now, as sometimes before, she reproached herself with his failures.  As we came in she hastily dried her eyes and went out of the room.  At dinner little was said, but in the afternoon there was a scene of which I came to know all a good while later.