It was nearly midnight when they arrived, and the parsonage was dark.  Miss Goldsworthy, not expecting him, was sitting up with a sick parishioner half a mile off; Ruby and the maid were fast asleep.  When the latter was heard stirring in her room, her master called a few questions to her, and then bade her go back to bed.

“We don’t want her poking round,” he whispered to Mary, as (when together they had hurried the mare into her stall) he led the drooping girl to his study—­and how grateful she was to him for this consideration!  He closed the door behind them, and led her gently to his own arm-chair—­she clung to the hand that was so kind to her in her need—­bidding her keep the rug about her (so as not to wet the furniture); and he lit a kerosene stove that was one of his private luxuries, always available when the maid-of-all-work was not.  He exhorted his charge to comfort herself by the poor blaze while he fetched such odds and ends of clothes as he could gather from his sister’s room; and then he told her to change her wet garments for these dry ones while he performed the same operation for himself elsewhere.  She obeyed him as meekly as a child, and was sitting huddled in Miss Goldsworthy’s faded flannel dressing-gown when he returned, carrying a kettle and a tray.

“Now I will make you a nice hot cup of tea,” said he cheerily, planting the kettle on a round hole at the top of the stove and the tray on his writing table.  “You put your clothes in the passage?  That’s right.  We’ll dry them presently.  Oh, yes”—­starting to cut bread and butter—­“you must have something to eat.  You have had no dinner.”

He forced her to eat, and to drink the hot tea, and she did feel the better for it.  Over her cup she lifted swimming eyes to his face, whispering:  “You are good to me!” And he remarked to himself that she was not mad, as he had thought.

When the meal was disposed of, he felt that the time for explanations and for considering how to deal with the extraordinary situation had come.

“Now, my dear,” he began, taking on something of the parson air at last, “the first thing to be done is to inform your family of your whereabouts.  I must go and find up somebody to take a message to them, to relieve their minds.”

She roused from her semi-torpor to plead for a reprieve.  Not yet—­not yet!  Whatever she had to face, let her rest for a little first.  They had parted with her for the night; they would not go to her room, she knew—­outcast as she now was from the sympathy of them all; they would not miss her before the morning.  And, oh, she could not go home!  She had disgraced her family—­her own father had wished her dead.  She was a wicked woman, not fit to live; but, if she must live, let it be anywhere—­anywhere—­rather than at Redford now!

At this repetition of her strange charge against a doting father, and the mention of disgrace, a distressing suspicion came into the parson’s mind.  He calculated the length of time between Guthrie Carey’s visits; he looked at her searchingly.  No, there was no evidence that she had done the special wrong.  But that there was wrong of some sort somewhere was evident enough.