And while she pondered thus, Andy prayed on and practiced his lessons in good manners, provoking the mirth of the whole family by his ludicrous attempts to be polite, and feeling sometimes tempted to give the matter up.

Andy was everything to Ethelyn, and once when her conscience was smiting her more than usual with regard to the blanks, she said to him abruptly: "if you had made a wicked vow, which would you do--keep it or break it, and so tell a falsehood ?" Andy was not much of a lawyer, he said, but "he thought he knew some scripter right to the pint," and taking his well-worn Bible he found and read the parable of the two sons commanded to work in their father's vineyard.
"If the Saviour commended the one who said he wouldn't and then went and did it, I think there can be no harm in your breaking a wicked vow: leastways I should do it." This was Andy's advice, and that night, long after the family were in bed, a light was shining in Ethelyn's chamber, where she sat writing to her husband, and as if Andy's spirit were pervading hers, she softened, as she wrote and asked forgiveness for all the past which she had made so wretched.

She was going to do better, she said, and when her husband came home she would try to make him happy.
"But, oh, Richard," she wrote, "please take me away from here to Camden, or Olney, or anywhere--so I can begin anew to be the wife I ought to be.
I was never worthy of you, Richard.

I deceived you from the first, and if I could summon the courage I would tell you about it." This letter which would have done so much good, was never finished, for when the morning came there were troubled faces at the prairie farmhouse--Mrs.Markham looking very anxious and Eunice very scared, James going for the doctor and Andy for Mrs.Jones, while up in Ethie's room, where the curtains were drawn so closely before the windows, life and death were struggling for the mastery, and each in a measure coming off triumphant..