● ● ●  that the judge without further ado ordered the clerk to write a bill of divorcement.³⁶

Mrs. Eddy’s own fuller explanation is that her husband eloped with the wife of a prominent Lynn businessman, that shortly afterwards the deluded woman returned and came to ask her forgiveness and her intercession with the outraged businessman, and that Patterson then presented himself, all ready to be accepted back once more. He returned, according to Susan Oliver, while Mrs. Patterson was again at the Phillipses, and Thomas Phillips so far forgot his Quaker nonviolence when he saw him standing in the door as to raise his cane and threaten him with it. But Mrs. Patterson restrained him and then took the decisive step herself. She told her once-loved Daniel with quiet firmness that they had come to the final parting of the ways.³⁷

Patterson paid a visit to Sanbornton Bridge in an effort to justify himself to his wife’s family, and it may have been Abigail Tilton who persuaded him to make his wife an annual allowance of two hundred dollars. This he paid in small installments, but after a year or two these payments stopped.

The rest of his life was a sad and lonely one, spent for the most part in drifting around New England and ending in 1896 after a period of hermitage in Saco, Maine. But a poignant note comes out of those years. In 1900 one R. D. Rounsevel, owner of a hotel or boardinghouse in Littleton, New Hampshire, declared in an affidavit: