“Oh!” cried the sick woman, “Albert has told you all about it!  Oh, dear! now I shall have more trouble!  Why didn’t he wait till I’m dead?  Isn’t it enough to have Katy drowned and Albert gone to that awful place and this trouble?  Oh!  I wish I was dead!  But then—­maybe God would be hard on me!  Do you think God would be hard on a woman that did wrong if she was told to do it?  And if she was told to do it by her own husband?  And if she had to do it to save her husband from some awful trouble?  There, I nearly told it.  Won’t that do?”

And she turned her head over and affected to be asleep.  Mr. Lurton was now more eager than ever that the whole truth should come out, since he began to see how important Mrs. Plausaby’s communication might be.  Beneath all his sweetness, as I have said, there was much manly firmness, and he now drew his chair near to the bedside, and began in a tone full of solemnity, with that sort of quiet resoluteness that a surgeon has when he decides to use the knife.  He was the more resolute because he knew that if Plausaby returned before the confession should be made, there would be no possibility of getting it.

“Mrs. Plausaby,” he said, but she affected to be asleep.  “Mrs. Plausaby, suppose a woman, by doing wrong when her husband asks it, brings a great calamity on the only child she has, locking him in prison and destroying his good name—­”

“Oh, dear, dear! stop!  You’ll kill me!  I knew Albert had told you.  Now I won’t say a word about it.  If he has told it, there is no use of my saying anything,” and she covered up her face in a stubborn, childish petulance.

CHAPTER XXXII.

A CONFESSION.

Mr. Lurton wisely left the room.  Mrs. Plausaby’s fears of death soon awakened again, and she begged Isa to ask Mr. Lurton to come back.  Like most feeble people, she had a superstitious veneration for ecclesiastical authority, and now in her weakened condition she had readily got a vague notion that Lurton held her salvation in his hands, and could modify the conditions if he would.

“You aren’t a Catholic are you, Mr. Lurton?”

“No, I am not at all a Catholic.”

“Well, then, what makes you want me to confess?”

“Because you are adding to your first sin a greater one in wronging your son by not confessing.”

“Who told you that?  Did Albert?”

“No, you told me as much as that, yourself.”

“Did I?  Why, then I might as well tell you all.  But why won’t that do?”

“Because, that much would not get Albert out of prison.  You don’t want to leave him in penitentiary when you’re gone, do you?”

“Oh, dear!  I can’t tell.  Plausaby won’t let me.  Maybe I might tell Isa.”

“That will do just as well.  Tell Miss Marlay.”  And Lurton walked out on the piazza.

For half an hour Mrs. Plausaby talked to Isa and told her nothing.  She would come face to face with the confession, and then say that she could not tell it, that Plausaby would do something awful if he knew she had said so much.