“I should think you had taken leave of your conscience!” cried her mother.

“I hope I have, mother.  I am going to consult my reason after this.”

“Your reason!”

“Well, then, my inclination.  I have had enough of conscience,—­of my own, and of yours, too.  That is what I told him, and that is what I mean.  There is such a thing as having too much conscience, and of getting stupefied by it, so that you can’t really see what’s right.  But I don’t care.  I believe I should like to do wrong for a while, and I will do wrong if it’s doing right to marry him.”

She had her hand on the door-knob, and now she opened the door, and closed it after her with something very like a bang.

She naturally could not keep within doors in this explosive state, and she went downstairs, and out upon the piazza.  Mr. Maynard was there, smoking, with his boots on top of the veranda-rail, and his person thrown back in his chair at the angle requisite to accomplish this elevation of the feet.  He took them down, as he saw her approach, and rose, with the respect in which he never failed for women, and threw his cigar away.

“Mr. Maynard,” she asked abruptly, “do you know where Mr. Libby is?”

“No, I don’t, doctor, I’m sorry to say.  If I did, I would send and borrow some more cigars of him.  I think that the brand our landlord keeps must have been invented by Mr. Track, the great anti-tobacco reformer.”

“Is he coming back?  Is n’t he coming back?” she demanded breathlessly.

“Why, yes, I reckon he must be coming back.  Libby generally sees his friends through.  And he’ll have some curiosity to know how Mrs. Maynard and I have come out of it all.”  He looked at her with something latent in his eye; but what his eye expressed was merely a sympathetic regret that he could not be more satisfactory.

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “Mr. Barlow might know something.”

“Well, now,” said Maynard, “perhaps he might, that very thing.  I’ll go round and ask him.”  He went to the stable, and she waited for his return.  “Barlow says,” he reported, “that he guesses he’s somewhere about Leyden.  At any rate, his mare,’s there yet, in the stable where Barlow left her.  He saw her there, yesterday.”

“Thanks.  That’s all I wished to know,” said Grace.  “I wished to write to him,” she added boldly.

She shut herself in her room and spent the rest of the forenoon in writing a letter, which when first finished was very long, but in its ultimate phase was so short as to occupy but a small space on a square correspondence-card.  Having got it written on the card, she was dissatisfied with it in that shape, and copied it upon a sheet of note-paper.  Then she sealed and addressed it, and put it into her pocket; after dinner she went down to the beach, and walked a long way upon the sands.  She thought at first that she would ask Barlow to get it to him, somehow;