Expiation
- Mr. Thornton sits with Mr. Hale having some conversation, totally unaware that Margaret is lying unconscious in the other room.
- Slowly but surely, Margaret recovers and gets back up off the floor. Now she needs to play out all of the ways her current situation could unfold, especially now that she has lied to the police to protect her brother.
- Meanwhile, Mr. Thornton takes his leave from Mr. Hale and goes out into the street. He bumps into the police inspector, who actually owes his job to Mr. Thornton. Mr. Thornton put in a good word for him when he joined the service.
- Since Mr. Thornton is also a local magistrate, he will need to oversee the investigation into the death of Mr. Leonards. The inspector fills him in on all the details, and Mr. Thornton is stunned when he hears that Margaret denies ever being at the train station on the night in question. Remember that he actually saw her heading there that night, so he knows she's lying.
- So what does Mr. Thornton do? Does he turn Margaret in or lie for her? You got it. He totally lies for her.
- Then Mr. Thornton tells the inspector to come see him at his factory in one hour before taking any more steps with the investigation. The dude agrees. Thornton spends the next hour playing through all the ways he could deal with his current situation. He finally decides that no matter what, Margaret must be kept from the shame of publicly admitting that she was walking alone at night with a young man.
- He suddenly decides that he won't face the inspector directly. Instead, he leaves a note for him saying that there's not enough evidence to justify an inquest and that the inspector should stop his investigation immediately. Thornton himself takes responsibility for anything that comes out of this decision.
- Truth be told, the inspector is relieved by the note, since he's spared from having to ask for Margaret's testimony again.
- That said, the inspector heads to Margaret's house to apologize and to tell her that everything's resolved with the Leonards case. While explaining, he lets slip that Mr. Thornton is the man who has called off the investigation. Margaret knows that Thornton saw her at the train station with Frederick. So now she's ashamed and mortified to think that Mr. Thornton knows she lied to the cops about not being there.
- She feels degraded in the eyes of Mr. Thornton, and goes to bed totally stressing out about it.
- The next morning, Dixon pokes her head in Margaret's room and gives her a letter from Frederick. After sending Dixon away, Margaret opens the letter.
- The letter says that Frederick has met with the London lawyer Henry Lennox, who says that there might be a slim chance of Frederick getting off the hook for his mutiny.
- In the final lines of his letter Frederick asks Margaret not to tell anyone that he has been in England.
- Looking over the letter, Margaret is frustrated to know that Frederick has been out of England (and out of danger) for more than thirty hours, while it's only been seventeen hours since she lied to the police. Had she gotten this letter sooner, she wouldn't have had to lie.
- She gets out of bed and walks around the house in a fog. Seeing that she's out of sorts, Mr. Hale makes her lie down on the couch and nurses her until she feels better. She wonders whether she should tell her father all her troubles, but knows that she can handle it all better than him.
- The two of them chat about Frederick's engagement to his Spanish fiancée. Margaret asks her father if they could visit Frederick in Spain some time. He says maybe, but reminds her that they can never leave Milton now. For him, it would be unfair to Mrs. Hale if they moved away from the city that killed her. He finally settles on the idea that Margaret can go visit Frederick herself and bring word of him back to her father.
- Margaret won't go without her dad, though, and in the end she decides that she'll stay hopeful about Mr. Lennox's chances of getting Frederick's charges dropped.
- Mr. Hale looks at his watch and says that he expected Mr. Thornton to come over that day. Margaret knows why the guy might not show up, though. It's because he knows she lied to the police and he doesn't want to face her. As she wonders about him, she actually enjoys the experience of realizing how much she respects his opinion of her. This is the first warm feeling she's had toward Thornton in quite a while.
- Over the next couple of days, Mr. Hale falls back into mourning for his wife. Margaret stays down in the dumps, too.