“Accident!  Pa, you make me boil.  Accident!  Accidents like that don’t happen.  If you let her stay there, or if—­Oh, to think of it!  And we were calling him a hero and—­and everything!  Hero! he stayed there just so she might—­”

“Hush! hush, child!”

“I shan’t hush.  Pa, are you going to let him disgrace himself with her?”

“No, no.  Probably there ain’t any idea of his marrying her.  If there is—­”

“If there is you put him out of the church and out of this town.  And as for her—­O-oh!  And we’ve been having him here at dinner and—­and I have—­Oh, I shall die!  I wish I was dead!”

Then followed hysterics and agony, greedily listened to by Debby, whose ear was at the crack of the door.  Captain Elkanah soothed and pleaded and tried to pacify.  It ended by his promising to investigate and, if necessary, take steps ‘immejitly.’

Lavinia Pepper sprung the mine on her brother.  Kyan was horrified.  He had grown to be one of Ellery’s most devoted worshipers.

“Smallpox!” he groaned.  “The minister got the smallpox.  Oh! that’s turrible.”

“Ain’t it?” observed his sister, also horrified, but rather relishing the horror.  “And if it hadn’t been for Gracie Van Horne—­”

“What?”

“What’s the matter with you?  I say, if Gracie Van Horne hadn’t happened to meet him, wanderin’ around, crazy as a coot, and toted him back—­”

“Gracie—­Van—­Horne!  Godfreys mighty!  She—­she met him?  Where?  Down to Peters’s grove, was it?”

“Peters’s grove!  No.  What on earth made you think ’twas there?  She’d been visitin’ Keziah Coffin at the parsonage, and when she come out on the main road she heard him aravin’ down the lane.  Must have passed right by this house and we never heard him.  I never see such a dead man as you be when you’re asleep.  You don’t sound dead, I’ll say that for you, but nothin’ wakes you up.”

“Why, Laviny! you never woke up yourself.”

“That’s right, lay it onto me.  I expected you would; it’s just like you.  But why in time did you think Grace met the minister way down to Peters’s grove?  That’s the most loony notion ever I heard, even from you.  What made you think of it?”

“Nothin’, nothin’.  I guess I was loony, maybe.  Dear! dear! dear! have you heard how’s he’s gettin’ on?  Is he took bad?”

“I ain’t heard nothin’ yet, nobody has.  But see here, ’Bish Pepper, you act funny to me.  I want to know more about that Peters’s grove notion.  Why did you say it?”

Kyan wriggled upon the rack and dodged and squirmed for the next twenty minutes.  He tried his best to keep the fateful secret, but he admitted too much, or not enough, and his sister kept up the cross-examination.  At the end of the session she was still unsatisfied, but she was on the scent and her brother knew it.  He fled to the woodshed and there punctuated his morning task of kindling chopping with groans and awful forebodings.