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 salt haystacks. Well, after that, wife, here, she kind o' give up about Mr. Jennison. You felt terrible bad, didn't you?"

"Yes, I did," Loreta assented, soberly, "though we couldn't never make up our minds that he was actually any nearer mixed up in the thing. You'd ought to say that," she added.

"You've said it for me," Obed returned. "That's enough."

His regret and shame at such disgrace to the blood of the Jennisons was as strong as his wife's, slightly as he expressed it. He continued his story rapidly:

"Well, the very week the bank was broken into he arrived here one mornin' suddenly, an' he stayed here a couple o' days. We remembered that later, in the trial; an' from here he went off to Canada. Next thing Mr. Clagg knew he'd given up all his law business, whatever it amounted to, an' was doing something, or nothing, in New York again. We scarcely saw him after that. He's come less and less often, as wife may have told you—once a year, once in two years. He was last over here in the spring. An' now I come to