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But the treacherous man, it was not in Justus Hoxon's scheme of things to receive a blow and return nothing. A "hardy fighter" he was esteemed, albeit his prowess was eclipsed by his more peaceful virtues. This, however, should be returned in kind. He would make no attack to be put in the wrong, arrested, perhaps, after the Colbury interpretation of assault and battery.
She felt for the first time in her life how Justus Hoxon's friend merited his confidence. Her mother had no reproaches, no sarcasms, no outbursts of grief. She addressed herself to the support and the comforting of her daughter, but with so evident a hopelessness and an expectation of bitter things to come that the girl burst out sobbing afresh. "D' ye think Wat air so wuthless ez all that!"
The wind came and went. The darkling bushes bowed and bent again. The leaves took up their testimony in elusive, sibilant mutterings. Justus Hoxon's eyes were cast upward for a moment, as he watched a massive bough of an oak-tree sway against the far sky, shutting off the stars, which became visible anew as the elastic branch swung back once more.
Such as it was, however, it satisfied all of Justus Hoxon's sense of the appropriate and the picturesque when Theodosia Blakely stepped out from the door and came slowly to meet him. The painter's art, if she were to be esteemed part of the foreground, might have seemed redeemed in her.
But Walter had many a weak point in his armor, glaringly apparent now to the once fond brother. Only a surly, bitter word he had for greeting to the few neighbors whom he met, and who went their way in the conviction that his brother had lost his election; for none ascribed any emotion of Justus Hoxon's to his own sake.
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