ed circle of the woods. Simultaneously I heard
his daughter saying, "I can't understand why he shouldn't have come to
us, or should have put it off. He couldn't think I didn't wish to see
him." And now I looked at my wife aghast, for I perceived that the
Haskeths must have lacked the courage to tell her that her father had
decided himself not to see her again, and that they had brought her to
us that we might stay her with some hopes, false or true, of meeting him
soon. "I don't know what they mean," she went on, appealing from them to
us, "by saying that it might be better if I never saw him again!"

"I don't say that any more, child," said Mrs. Hasketh, with affecting
humility. "I'm sure there isn't any one in the whole world that I would
bless the sight of half as much."

"I could have come before, if I'd known where he was; or, if I had only
known, I might have been here Saturday!" She broke into a piteous
lamentation, with tears and sobs that wrung my heart and made me feel
like one of a conspiracy of monsters. "But he couldn't--he
couldn't--have thought I didn't _want_ to see him!"

It was a very trying moment for us all, and I think that if we had, any
of us, had our choice, we should have preferred to be in her place
rather than our own. We miserably did what we could to comfort her, and
we at last silenced her with I do not know what pretences. The affair
was quite too much for me, and I made a feint of having heard the
children calling me, and I went out into the hall. I felt that there was
a sort of indecency in my witnessing that poor young thing's emotion;
women might see it, but a man ought not. Perhaps old Hasketh felt the
same; he followed me out, and when we were beyond hearing, even if he
had spoken aloud, he dropped his voice to a thick murmur and said, "This
has all been a mistake. We have had to get out of it with the girl the
best we could; and we don't dare to let her know that Tedham isn't
coming back any more. You noticed from what she said that my wife tried
to make believe it might be well if he didn't; but she had to drop
_that_; it set the girl wild. She hasn't got anything but the one idea:
that she and her father belong to each other, and that they must be
together for the rest of their lives. A curious thing about it is," and
Hasketh sank his voice still lower to say this, "that she thinks that if
he's taken the punishment that was put upon him he has atoned for what
he did; and if any