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recent events, this man having taken her on as a spiritual and economic responsibility and then left her inoperative in a land surrounded by foreigners, mountains, and the sea: he was somewhat muddled. What he could make out with little difficulty was the disapproval of his dead wife's sister and the silent cousin, both of whom wanted the body back. From convenient habit he disagreed with them. This gave him good excuse for staying away from home. It was in the Depot Tavern that he received condolences, accepted funerary offers of drink, and, when these recognitions were exhausted, he sank into the habit of talking familiarly about persons and places unknown to his cronies, so that several of them suspected him of reading. Vague as it had been, his period of mourning did not last long for his temper was not suited to it, and he was never known to mention his daughter's name, in the Depot Tavern at any rate, again.
In the immediate family, blood proved thicker than three thousand miles of sea water; and prospect of scandal precluded any schismatic activities the Gwyon blood might not have taken care of. They faded in thin-lipped silence, though there were a few, wavering souls haunted by Darwinian shadows of doubt, who, when the mocking companion from Gibraltar was discovered, made it known to one another that they had no intention of forgiving him, in this world or the next.
In the late spring Reverend Gwyon returned to the pulpit of the First Congregational Church. The people inherently respected him, for their fathers had held his father in almost as high regard as they held their own. The name had the weight of generations behind it since, two centuries before, Reverend John H. Gwyon had been butchered by disaffectionate Indians whose myth he had tried to replace with his own. Most of that congregation pointed out pillars of Puritan society among their forebears, who had never permitted maudlin attachment to other human beings to interfere with duty. To suffer a witch to live was as offensive to the God of Calvin, Luther, and Wesley, as it was to That of the Pope of Rome; and as though bent on surpassing the record of the Holy Inquisition in the neighborhood of Toulouse, where four hundred were burned in half a century, these stern hands kept the air of the New World clean the same way, and might well have been locked up had they appeared among this present posterity, but were wisely exiled in death. They had done their work, passed on the heritage of guilt. The rest was not their business.
This congregation admired the Reverend's bearing up, as they called it, under his suffering (though there were an evilly human few who envied him his Providence) and they had never had the full details of the Spanish affair. Enough to know that their minister was of familiar lineage, had suffered sore trials, and was now returned from temporal disasters to lead them unfaltering, by word and example, in the ways of Christian fortitude.
His sermons took up a lively course. In his loneliness, Gwyon found himself studying again. With the loss of Camilla he returned to the times before he had known her, among the Zuñi and Mojave, the Plains Indians and the Kwakiutl. He strayed far from his continent, and spent late hours of the night participating in dark practices from Borneo to Assam. On the desk before him, piled and spread broadcast about his study, lay Euripides and Saint Teresa of Avila, Denys the Carthusian, Plutarch, Clement of Rome, and the Apocryphal New Testament, copies of Osservatore Romano and a tract from the Society for the Prevention of Premature Burial. De Contemptu Mundi , Historia di tutte I'Heresie , Christ and the Powers of Darkness , De Locis Infestis , Libellus de Terrificationibus Nocturnisque Tumultibus . Malay Magic , Religions des Peuples Non-civiíisés , Le Culte de Dionysos en Attique , Philosophumena , Lexikon der Mythologie . On a volume of Sir James Frazer (open to the heading, Sacrifice of the