And Jed
himself was silent also. He shared her feeling of guilt. He felt
that he had been told something which neither he nor any outsider
should have heard, and his sensitive spirit found little
consolation in the fact that the hearing of it had come through no
fault of his. Besides, he was not so sure that he had been
faultless. He had permitted the child's disclosures to go on when,
perhaps, he should have stopped them. By the time the "Araminta's"
nose slid up on the sloping beach at the foot of the bluff before
the Winslow place she held two conscience-stricken culprits instead
of one.
And if Ruth Armstrong slept but little that night, as her daughter
said had been the case the night before, she was not the only
wakeful person in that part of Orham. She would have been
surprised if she had known that her eccentric neighbor and landlord
was also lying awake and that his thoughts were of her and her
trouble. For Jed, although he had heard but the barest fragment of
the story of "Uncle Charlie," a mere hint dropped from the lips of
a child who did not understand the meaning of what she said, had
heard enough to make plain to him that the secret which the young
widow was hiding from the world was a secret involving sorrow and
heartbreak for herself and shame and disgrace for others. The
details he did not know, nor did he wish to know them; he was
entirely devoid of that sort of curiosity.
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