tly. "She was all right."

"You were to blame in the particular instance," his father answered.
"But in general the fault was in her--or her temperament. As long as the
romance lasted she might have deluded herself, and believed you were all
she imagined you; but romance can't last, even with women. I don like
your faults, and I don't want you to excuse them to yourself. I don't
like your chancing things, and leaving them to come out all right of
themselves; but I've always tried to make you children see all your
qualities in their true proportion and relation."

"Yes; I know that, sir," said Dan.

"Perhaps," continued his father, as they swung easily along, shoulder
to shoulder, "I may have gone too far in that direction because I was
afraid that you might take your mother too seriously in the other--that
you might not understand that she judged you from her nerves and not
her convictions. It's part of her malady, of her suffering, that her
inherited Puritanism clouds her judgment, and makes her see all faults
as of one size and equally damning. I wish you to know that she was not
always so, but was once able to distinguish differences in error, and to
realise that evil is of ill-will."

"Yes; I know that," said Dan. "She is now--when she feels well."

"Harm comes from many things, but evil is of the heart. I wouldn't
have you condemn yourself too severely for harm that you didn't
intend--that's remorse--that's insanity; and I wouldn't have you fall
under the condemnation of another's invalid judgment."

"Thank you, father," said Dan.

They had come up to the paddock behind the barn, and they laid their
arms on the fence while they looked over at the horses, which were
still there. The beasts, in their rough winter coats, some bedaubed with
frozen clots of the mud in which they had been rolling earlier in the
afternoon, stood motionless in the thin, keen breeze that crept over
the hillside from the March sunset, and blew their manes and tails out
toward Dan and his father. Dan's pony sent him a gleam of recognition
from under his frowsy bangs, but did not stir.

"Bunch looks like a caterpillar," he said, recalling the time when his
father had given him the pony; he was a boy then, and the pony was as
much to him, it went through his mind, as Alice had ever been. Was it
all a jest, an irony? he asked himself.

"He's getting pretty old," said his father. "Let's see: you were only
twelve."

"Ten," said Dan. "W