“Your father is perfectly safe, dear,” he said, “and he is earning a great deal of money.”

“What is he doing?” asked Charlotte, and her manner showed for the first time suspicion of her father.

“Something perfectly honest, dear,” Anderson replied, simply, “but he does not want you to know and he does not want the others to know.  You just be contented and brave and make the best of it all.”

That was not long before they were married.  It had seemed best to them all that they should not delay long.  Mrs. Carroll did not come to the wedding, because Ina was ill.  Anna knew as well as Anderson what her brother was doing.  She had somehow comforted her sister-in-law without telling her anything, but she did not think it best to visit Banbridge.  She had at times a feeling as if she herself were doing what her brother was, and the shame and pride together stung her in the same way.  She wrote by every mail to Carroll, and posted it in another town, and nobody knew.  In one of the letters she told him with an unconcealed glee that his old enemy, the man who had brought about all this, had had a shock of paralysis.

“He will never speak again,” she wrote.  “He has become dead while he is alive.  After all, the Lord is just.”

Carroll got that letter a few weeks after Charlotte was married.  One Sunday night he made a trip to Banbridge.  He was close-shaven; he had grown very thin; nobody would have recognized him, nobody did recognize him, although he met several Banbridge people whom he used to know on the train.  It was after dark, but the winter sky was full of stars, which seemed very near as he took his way up the street towards the Anderson house.  He walked slowly when he approached the house, and frequently cast a look behind him, as if he were afraid of being seen.  When he reached the house he saw the curtains in the sitting-room were not drawn, and a warm glow of home seemed to shine forth into the wintry night.  Carroll cautiously went up the steps, very softly.  He went far enough to see the interior of the room, and he saw Charlotte and her husband sitting there.  Mrs. Anderson was there also.  She was reading the Bible, as befitted a Sunday night.  Now and then she looked at Charlotte with a look of the utmost love and pride.  Anderson, who was reading the paper, looked up, and the watching man saw him, and his eyes and Charlotte’s met.  The man watching knew that no anxiety about him seriously troubled her then, that she was entirely happy, and a feeling of sublime content and delight that it should be so, and he quite outside of it all, came over him.