t now?"

"As far as I can set it straight. Probably nothing will undo the effect.
She'll think that I was cruel in the first instance if not in the last."

He sat staring at his boots, with a very discontented expression of
countenance. But he did not get much sympathy from Mr. Kenyon.

"Well," he said, "I suppose you've yourself to blame. I've no doubt you
have been very hasty, lots of times. It's my own idea that if you went
into detail over a good many actions of your past life"--this was very
significantly said--"you would find that you had been mistaken pretty
often. We all do. And there's one mistake that I think I can point out
to you."

Caspar looked at him hard for a moment from under his bushy eyebrows.

"One subject, Kenyon," he said, seriously, "I shall ask you to respect."

"All right," said Maurice. "I am only speaking of your daughter. You
must allow me to say that I think you have misjudged her, ever since she
has been in your house for the last three months. I did just the same,
at first. You see, she came here, as far as I can make out, puzzled,
ignorant of the world, deprived of her mother's help and care, thrown on
the tender mercies of a father whom she did not know----"

"And whom she took to be an ogre," said Brooke, with a bitter, little
laugh.

"Brought into a world that she knew nothing about, and amongst a set of
people who could not understand why she looked sad and lonely, poor
child!----"

"I say, Maurice, you are speaking of my daughter, remember."

"Don't be touchy, old man. I speak and I think of her with every
respect. We have all misjudged and misunderstood her: she is a young
girl, little more than a child, and a child astray, pining
uncomplainingly for her mother, doing her best to understand the new
world she was thrown into, devouring your writings and trying as hard as
she could to assimilate every good and noble idea that she came
across--I say that she's a saint and a heroine," said Maurice, with
sudden passion and enthusiasm, "and we've forgotten that not a girl in a
thousand could have come through a trying ordeal so well!"

"She hasn't come out of her ordeal at all, Maurice: the ordeal of living
in the house of a brutal father, who, in her view, probably broke her
mother's heart: all that has to be proceeded with for nine months
longer!"

"It need not be an ordeal if she knows that you love her: if she writes
to her mother and gets the sympathy and aid she needs