"They may find out that baby is alone," she said; "they're wicked enough to injure him out of revenge." Along the wooden pavements of Gallatin, past the gaily-painted wooden houses, through the doors of which whole families were now emerging to ask the cause of disturbance, Susannah fled miserably, her cheeks blanched beneath her veil, her heart within weeping.
The sun was shining brightly on just and unjust; the gardens of Gallatin were brilliant with such flowers as had bloomed in the August when she first met her husband.

Susannah felt then that the reason why she desired to clasp and guard the sleeping child she had left was that he was Angel's son; the pity for injured innocence had been from the first until now her strongest passion, and at the thought of Halsey, innocent and gentle, in the midst of the brutal fight she had left, her soul wept as it were the scalding tears that her eyes refused to shed.
The boy lay in rosy sleep, a woman of the inn keeping a kindly eye upon him.

Probably nothing but a mother's love could have fancied him of sufficient importance to attract public attention, but Susannah, locking her door, knelt by the bed, and spreading protecting arms above him, listened with strained senses for news of Halsey's injury or death.

For years she had feared that the violence she had seen wreaked upon others would touch her husband; violence offered to herself would have seemed a trivial grief in comparison.

The fear that has long harped upon sore nerves has a cumulative action upon the pain of its realisation.
Susannah found herself giving forth short ejaculatory whispers of prayer upon the close air of the plain, small room in which she knelt.