ngers still on the knob of the
door.

"I never meant to say," said Lesley, confronting him, "that I was
incapable of sympathy with you in admiration for my father. With my
feeling towards him you have nothing to do--that is all. I am not angry
because you express your own sentiments, but because----"

She stopped and bit her lip.

"----Because I dared divine what yours might be?" asked Maurice, boldly,
and with an accent of reproach. "Is it possible that yours _can_ be like
mine? and am I to blame for saying so? How can you estimate the worth of
his work? You, a girl fresh from school! I know it is very rude to say
so, but I cannot help it. If you were more of a woman, Miss Brooke, if
you had had a wider experience of life and mankind, you would
acknowledge that you could not possibly know very much of what your
father had done, and you would be glad of the opportunity of learning!"

This was just the speech calculated to make Lesley furiously angry, and
it was with great difficulty that she restrained the words that rose
impetuously to her lips. She stood motionless and silent, and Maurice
mistook her silence for that of stupid obstinacy, when it was the
silence of wounded feeling and passionate resentment. He went on hotly,
for he began to feel himself once more in the right.

"Of course you _may_ know all about him: you may know as much as I who
have lived and worked at his side, so to speak, for the last six years!
You may be familiar with his writings: you may have seen the _Tribune_
every week, and you may know that wonderful book of his--'The
Unexplored' I mean, not the essays--by heart; there may be nothing that
I can tell you, even about his gallant fight for one of the hospitals
last year, or the splendid work he has set going at the Macclesfield
Buildings in North London, or the way in which his name is blessed by
hundreds--yes hundreds--of men and women and children whom he has helped
to lead a better life! You may know all about these things, and plenty
more, but you _can't_ know--coming here without having seen him since
you were a baby--you _can't_ know the beauty of his character, or the
depths of his sympathy for the erring, or the tremendous efforts that he
has made, and is still making, for the laboring poor. You can't know
this, or else I'd tell you, Miss Brooke, what you would be doing! You
would be working heart and soul to lighten his burdens and relieve him
of the incessant drudgery that int