If no quarrel had taken place at the lime-kiln, I should have been quite ready, as I viewed the case, to believe that John Jago's disappearance was referable to the terrible disappointment which Naomi had inflicted on him.

The same morbid dread of ridicule which had led him to assert that he cared nothing for Naomi, when he and Silas had quarreled under my bedroom window, might also have impelled him to withdraw himself secretly and suddenly from the scene of his discomfiture.

But to ask me to believe, after what had happened at the lime-kiln, that he was still living, was to ask me to take Ambrose Meadowcroft's statement for granted as a true statement of facts.
I had refused to do this from the first; and I still persisted in taking that course.

If I had been called upon to decide the balance of probability between the narrative related by Ambrose in his defense and the narrative related by Silas in his confession, I must have owned, no matter how unwillingly, that the confession was, to my mind, the least incredible story of the two.
Could I say this to Naomi?
I would have written fifty advertisements inquiring for John Jago rather than say it; and you would have done the same, if you had been as fond of her as I was.

I drew out the advertisement, for insertion in the Morwick _Mercury_, in these terms: MURDER .-- Printers of newspapers throughout the United States are desired to publish that Ambrose Meadowcroft and Silas Meadowcroft, of Morwick Farm, Morwick County, are committed for trial on the charge of murdering John Jago, now missing from the farm and from the neighborhood.