e with
you--." But her voice was lost in sobbing, and she could make no
promise as to her future conduct.

[Illustration: "If I may bide with you,--if I may bide
with you."]

"She may stay with us," the father said, turning to his eldest
daughter; "but I shall never be able to show my face again about the
parish."

He had uttered no words of forgiveness to his daughter, nor had he
bestowed upon her any kiss. Fanny had raised her when she was on the
ground at his feet, and had made her seat herself apart.

"In all the whole warld," he said, looking round upon his wife and
his elder child, raising his hand as he uttered the words, and
speaking with an emphasis that was terrible to the hearers, "there
is no thing so vile as a harlot." All the dreaded fierceness of his
manner had then come back to him, and neither of them had dared to
answer him. After that he at once went back to the mill, and to Fanny
who followed him he vouchsafed to repeat the permission that his
daughter should be allowed to remain beneath his roof.

Between twelve and one she again went to fetch him to his dinner. At
first he declared that he would not come, that he was busy, and that
he would eat a morsel, where he was, in the mill. But Fanny argued
the matter with him.

"Is it always to be so, father?"

"I do not know. What matters it, so as I have strength to do a turn
of work?"

"It must not be that her presence should drive you from the house.
Think of mother, and what she will suffer. Father, you must come."

Then he allowed himself to be led into the house, and he sat in his
accustomed chair, and ate his dinner in gloomy silence. But after
dinner he would not smoke.

"I tell 'ee, lass, I do not want the pipe to-day. Now't has got
itself done. D'ye think as grist 'll grind itself without hands?"

When Carry said that it would be better than this that she should go
again, Fanny told her to remember that evil things could not be cured
in a day. With the mother that afternoon was, on the whole, a happy
time, for she sat with her lost child's hand within her own. Late in
the evening, when the miller returned to his rest, Carry moved about
the house softly, resuming some old task to which in former days she
had been accustomed; and as she did so the miller's eyes would wander
round the room after her; but he did not speak to her on that day,
nor did he pronounce her name.

Two other circumstances which bear upon our story occurre