“She ha’n’t got any call to feel
bad about it,” said Lemuel clumsily. “It
was just a mistake.” Then, not knowing what
more to say, he said, being come to the outer door
by this time, “Well, I wish you good morning.”
“Well, good morning,” said ’Manda
Grier, and she thrust her elbow sharply into Statira
Dudley’s side, so that she also said faintly—
“Well, good morning!” She was fluent enough
on the witness-stand and in the police station, but
now she could not find a word to say.
The three stood together on the threshold of the court-house,
not knowing how to get away from one another.
’Manda Grier put out her hand to Lemuel.
He took it, and, “Well, good morning,”
he said again.
“Well, good morning,” repeated ’Manda
Grier.
Then Statira put out her hand, and she and Lemuel
shook hands, and said together, “Well, good
morning,” and on these terms of high civility
they parted. He went one way and they another.
He did not look back, but the two girls, marching
off with locked arms and flying tongues, when they
came to the corner, turned to look back. They
both turned inward, and so bumped their heads together.
“Why, you—coot!” cried ’Manda
Grier, and they broke out laughing.
Lemuel heard their laugh, and he knew they were laughing
at him; but he did not care. He wandered on,
he did not know whither, and presently he came to
the only place he could remember.
The place was the Common, where his trouble had begun.
He looked back to the beginning, and could see that
it was his own fault. To be sure, you might say
that if a fellow came along and offered to pay you
fifty cents for changing a ten-dollar bill, you had
a right to take it; but there was a voice in Lemuel’s
heart which warned him that greed to another’s
hurt was sin, and that if you took too much for a
thing from a necessitous person, you oppressed and
robbed him. You could make it appear otherwise,
but you could not really change the nature of the
act. He owned this with a sigh, and he owned
himself justly punished. He was still on those
terms of personal understanding with the eternal spirit
of right which most of us lose later in life, when
we have so often seemed to see the effect fail to
follow the cause, both in the case of our own misdeeds
and the misdeeds of others.
He sat down on a bench, and he sat there all day,
except when he went to drink from the tin cup dangling
by the chain from the nearest fountain. His good
breakfast kept him from being hungry for a while,
but he was as aimless and as hopeless as ever, and
as destitute. He would have gone home now if
he had had the money; he was afraid they would be
getting anxious about him there, though he had not
made any particular promises about the time of returning.
He had dropped a postal card into a box as soon as
he reached Boston, to tell of his safe arrival, and
they would not expect him to write again.
