Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/196

 "Not so; we may be cried out upon any day, any hour; what would you do? Would you believe their accusations against us?"

"Good heavens! Hannah—how can you ask it? No! ten thousand times no! God forbid."

"But why not, if the evidence were conclusive? you have believed it in other cases, why not in ours?"

"Why not? because it would be too monstrous; because I know you both incapable of such things."

"Perhaps so; but how would that avail us? you could not convey your convictions of our innocence to other minds. So did I fully believe in the entire innocence of my poor old friend, Goody Nurse—and so did hundreds of others—but what did that avail her? At my urgent request my husband drew up a paper in testimony of her worth and her blameless life, and many of our best people signed it gladly; but the petition of her friends was rejected, and the words of those miserable children, and of one or two other persons who were known to have a grudge against her or her family, took away