But a search had been made for the missing man and, quite by accident, they had found him, at a time when it seemed to him his mind must go with his captor’s.  His recovery from the physical blight of this captivity had been prompt; but there were those who sat under him who insisted that ever after he had been palpably less insistent upon the feature of divine retribution for what might be called the merely technical sins of heterodoxy.  Not that unsound doctrine was ever so much as hinted of him; only, as once averred a plain parishioner, “He seemed to bear down on hell jest a lee-tle less continuously.”

As for his young wife, she had ever after professed an unconquerable aversion for those sermons in which God’s punishment of sinners was set forth; and this had strangely been true of their daughter, born but a little time after the father’s release from the maniac’s cabin.  She had grown to womanhood submitting meekly to an iron rule; but none the less betraying an acute repugnance for certain doctrines preached by her father.  It seemed to the old man a long way to look back; and then a long way to come forward again, past the death of his girl-wife while their child was still tender, down to the amazing iniquity of that child’s revolt, in her thirty-first year.  Dumbly, dutifully, had she submitted to all his restrictions and severities, stonily watching her girlhood go, through a fading, lining and hardening of her prettiness.  Then all at once, with no word of pleading or warning, she had done the monstrous thing.  He awoke one day to know that his beloved child had gone away to marry the handsome, swaggering, fiddle-playing good-for-nothing who had that winter given singing lessons in the village.

Only once after that had he looked upon her face—­the face of a withered sprite, subdued by time.  The hurt of that look was still fresh in him, making his mind turn heavily, perhaps a little remorsefully, to the two little boys asleep in the west bedroom.  Had the seed of revolt been in her, from his own revolt against his father?  Would it presently bear some ugly fruit in her sons?

From a drawer in the table he took a little sheaf of folded sheets, and read again the last letter that had come from her; read it not without grim mutterings and oblique little jerks of the narrow old head, yet with quick tender glows melting the sternness.

“You must not think I have ever regretted my choice, though every day of my life I have sorrowed at your decision not to see me so long as I stayed by my husband.  How many times I have prayed God to remind you that I took him for better or worse, till death should us part.”

This made him mutter.

“Clayton has never in his life failed of kindness and gentleness to me”—­so ran the letter—­“and he has always provided for us as well as a man of his uncommon talents could.”

Here the old man sniffed in fine contempt.