n. They have to work, I reckon,
whether they like it or no."

"You said they _like_ to lie in the sun. What makes them work?"

"Makes them!" said Preston, who was getting irritated as well as
impatient. "They get a good flogging if they do not work--that is all.
They know, if they don't do their part, the lash will come down: and
it don't come down easy."

I suppose I must have looked as if it had come down on me. Preston
stopped talking and began to take care of me, putting his arm round me
to support my steps homeward. In the verandah my aunt met us. She
immediately decided that I was ill, and ordered me to go to bed at
once. It was the thing of all others I would have wished to do. It
saved me from the exertion of trying to hold myself up and of speaking
and moving and answering questions. I went to bed in dull misery,
longing to go to sleep and forget all my troubles of mind and body
together; but while the body rested, the mind would not. That kept the
consciousness of its burden; and it was that, more than any physical
ail, which took away my power of eating, and created instead a
wretched sort of half nausea, which made even rest unrefreshing. As
for rest in my mind and heart, it seemed at that time as if I should
never know it again. Never again! I was a child--I had but vague ideas
respecting even what troubled me; nevertheless I had been struck,
where may few children be struck! in the very core and quick of my
heart's reverence and affection. It had come home to me that papa was
somehow doing wrong. My father was in my childish thought and belief,
the ideal of chivalrous and high-bred excellence;--and _papa_ was
doing wrong. I could not turn my eyes from the truth; it was before me
in too visible a form. It did not arrange itself in words, either; not
at first; it only pressed upon my heart and brain that seven hundred
people on my father's property were injured, and by his will, and for
his interests. Dimly the consciousness came to me; slowly it found its
way and spread out its details before me; bit by bit one point after
another came into my mind to make the whole good; bit by bit one item
after another came in to explain and be explained and to add its quota
of testimony; all making clear and distinct and dazzling before me the
truth which at first it was so hard to grasp. And this is not the less
true because my childish thought at first took everything vaguely and
received it slowly. I was a child a