daughter was with her."

There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham's old insinuation, but
coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something
like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my
surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his
suggestion in the way I had thought she would.

"No," she said, "that wouldn't do. She has kept account of the time, you
may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your
behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth."

"I didn't know," he returned, "but you might evade the point, somehow.
So much being at stake," he added, as if explaining.

Still my wife was not severe with him. "I don't understand, quite," she
said.

"Being the turning-point in my life, I can't begin to do anything, to be
anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don't know where to find
myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should
know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that."

"But, of course, there is another point of view."

"My daughter's?"

"Mrs. Hasketh's."

"I don't care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the
child's sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time--the only
thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to."

He continued: "I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is
no sense in the whole thing, if I haven't. They might as well have let
me go in the beginning. Don't you think that ten years out of my life is
enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a
thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried
to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is
the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be
rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could
condone--"

"Oh, you mustn't reason from us," my wife broke in. "We are very silly
people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have
got to reckon with the world at large."

"I _have_ reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the
reckoning. But why shouldn't my daughter look at this thing as you do?"

Instead of answering, my wife asked, "When did you hear from her last?"

Tedham took a few thin, worn letters from his breast-pocket "There is
Mr. March's letter," he said, laying one on his knee. He handed my wife
another.

She