Merciful God!
And the Griffiths, of Lycurgus, her husband’s brother, knowing of this and not writing!
Ashamed, disgusted, no doubt.
Indifferent.
But no, he had hired two lawyers.
Yet the horror!
Asa!
Her other children!
What the papers would say!
This mission!
They would have to give it up and go somewhere else again.
Yet was he guilty or not guilty?
She must know that before judging or thinking.
This paper said he had pleaded not guilty.
Oh, that wretched, worldly, showy hotel in Kansas City!
Those other bad boys!
Those two years in which he wandered here and there, not writing, passing as Harry Tenet.
Doing what?
Learning what?
She paused, full of that intense misery and terror which no faith in the revealed and comforting verities of God and mercy and salvation which she was always proclaiming, could for the moment fend against.
Her boy!
Her Clyde!
In jail, accused of murder!
She must wire! She must write! She must go, maybe.
But how to get the money!
What to do when she got there.
How to get the courage — the faith — to endure it.
Yet again, neither Asa nor Frank nor Julia must know.
Asa, with his protesting and yet somehow careworn faith, his weak eyes and weakening body.
And must Frank and Julia, now just starting out in life, be saddled with this? Marked thus?
Merciful God!
Would her troubles never end?
She turned, her big, work-worn hands trembling slightly, shaking the paper she held, while Esta, who sympathized greatly with her mother these days because of all she had been compelled to endure, stood by.
She looked so tired at times, and now to be racked by this!
Yet, as she knew, her mother was the strongest in the family — so erect, so square-shouldered, defiant — a veritable soul pilot in her cross-grained, uniformed way.
“Mamma, I just can’t believe it can be Clyde,” was all Esta could say now.
“It just can’t be, can it?”
But Mrs. Griffiths merely continued to stare at that ominous headline, then swiftly ran her gray-blue eyes over the room.
Her broad face was blanched and dignified by an enormous strain and an enormous pain.
Her erring, misguided, no doubt unfortunate, son, with all his wild dreams of getting on and up, was in danger of death, of being electrocuted for a crime — for murder!
He had killed some one — a poor working-girl, the paper said.
“Ssh!” she whispered, putting one finger to her own lips as a sign.
“He” (indicating Asa) “must not know yet, anyhow.
We must wire first, or write.
You can have the answers come to you, maybe.
I will give you the money.
But I must sit down somewhere now for a minute.
I feel a little weak.
I’ll sit here.
Let me have the Bible.”