It was the thought of the sacerdotal deception that she felt had been so lately practised upon herself that caused her to put in the reserving words “in the matter of daily life”; but when she remembered the malice that had instigated report, the unlovely lives of the malicious fault-finders, the evil stains that lie even upon the best lives, she burst out, “There is not one in our community, Ephraim, who would stoop to a cruel act either in word or deed.  There is not one of us, even among those who have recently repented from very wicked lives, who would try to take the life of a defenceless man when he was, at a great cost to himself, pursuing what he thought to be the path of duty—­as you did, Ephraim.”

Before this he had kept his eyes upon the ground; standing still now, he looked straight into hers.  So for a minute they stood, the horse’s head drooping beside his shoulder, the woman upon the roadside erect, passionate; around them the leafless wood through which the long straight road was cut.  The long level red beams of the sun struck through between the gray trunks, burnishing the wet carpet of the fallen leaf.

“Did you think it was I who fired?” he asked.

Then he went on with the horse, and she at the side.

She was utterly astonished.  “Who, Ephraim—­who fired?”

He looked straight in front of him again.  “It was my mother.  She brandished the gun in his face.  She couldn’t have intended to shoot.”

From Susannah’s heart a great cloud was lifted.  She felt no confused need to readjust her thoughts; rather it was that in a moment her apprehension of Ephraim’s character slipped easily from some abnormal strain into normal pleasure.

She pressed her hands to her breast as if fondling some delight.  “Forgive me,” she said, “but I am so glad, oh, so very glad.”  She drew a long breath as if inhaling not the autumn but the new sweetness of spring.

So they went on a little way, he somewhat shy because of her emotion, she meditating again, and this question pressed.

“And you think,” she asked, “that your mother would receive me if I went back with you? that I could live at peace with her?”

“Do you think that whatever I might do she would ever try to shoot me?” he asked with half a smile.  “Do you think that she would ever, by word or deed, do anything that would hurt me?”

“Never.”  Susannah said the word as a matter of course.

“Or that my father would ever deny me anything that I seriously asked for, or that he knew my happiness depended upon?”

“No, surely not; but, Ephraim—­”

“Oh,” he continued, growing distress in his voice, “Susannah, is there any place else in the whole world that you can go for shelter and comfort but to our house?  You have spoken of this madness and delusion; you are satisfied that you must leave—­” He had meant to say “this man,” but he was too shy, and he faltered—­“that you must leave these people?”