in Chicago, she had been obliged to think of herself as working for fit punishment for him. To know that he was dead ended for Ethel the sense of recreancy in her duty to proceed against him. Fate or Providence—or Chance, if you chose that appellation—had well disposed of Kincheloe, she thought. Could the same powers be depended upon to punish, also fittingly, her grandfather?
In his case, she thought of those Powers as less impersonal; she thought of the soul of her father, of the boy Bob who had wished Quinlan to tell and then of "J.Q." himself with the flaming torch; and her sense of abandonment of them was lessened by the clear information given in Barney's brief phrases that he was absorbed in the business which they had begun together. This last letter, like the preceding ones, indicated progress and made her long to know and to aid. But she, on her part, was very busy; not only in Sheridan but in traveling about from one of her father's properties to another.
It is a peculiar quality of a lie suggested (and old Lucas knew this peculiarity well) that it finds, in the mind of the hearer, increasing reinforcement for itself when the baldly declared falsity would encounter ever-deepening denial; and so it was that Ethel, alone and with many solitary hours for self-examination, continued, unwillingly, to discover within her reflections new fears that what her grandfather told her was all true, that Barney was Agnes's and her father's son. The very community of cousin Agnes's and her father's interests in these western developments added proof; as she had herself said to her grandfather, cousin Agnes and her father had had no written agreement; they completely understood each other.
