ed, and
that you must have been expecting at once, if you say--"

"I presume," Mrs. Hasketh said, "that he wished you to ask after his
daughter. I can understand why he did not come to us." She let one of
those dreadful silences follow, and again my wife was forced to speak.

"It is something that we didn't mean to press at all, Mrs. Hasketh, and
I won't say anything more. Only, if you care to send any word to him he
will be at our house this evening again, and I will give him your
message." She rose, not in resentment, as I could see (and I knew that
she had not come upon this errand without making herself Tedham's
partisan in some measure) but with sincere good feeling and appreciation
of Mrs. Hasketh's position. I rose with her, and Hasketh rose too.

"Oh, don't go!" Mrs. Hasketh broke out, as if surprised. "You couldn't
help coming, and I don't blame you at all. I don't blame Mr. Tedham
even. I didn't suppose I should ever forgive him. But there! that's all
long ago, and the years do change us. They change us all, Mrs. March,
and I don't feel as if I had the right to judge anybody the way I used
to judge _him_. Sometimes it surprises me. I did hate him, and I don't
presume I've got very much love for him now, but I don't want to punish
him any more. That's gone out of me. I don't know how it came to go, but
it went. I wish he hadn't ever got anything more to do with us, but I'm
afraid we haven't had all our punishment yet, whatever _he_ has. It
seems to me as if the sight of Mr. Tedham would make me sick."

I found such an insufficiency in this statement of feeling that I wanted
to laugh, but I perceived that it did not appeal to my wife's sense of
humor. She said, "I can understand how you feel about it, Mrs. Hasketh."

Mrs. Hasketh seemed grateful for the sympathy. "I presume," she went on,
and I noted how often she used the quaint old-fashioned Yankee word,
"that you feel as if you had almost as much right to hate him as I had,
and that if you could overlook what he tried to do to you, I might
overlook what he did do to his own family. But as I see it, the case is
different. He failed when he tried to put the blame on Mr. March, and he
succeeded only too well in putting the shame on his own family. You
could forgive it, and it would be all the more to your credit because
you forgave it, but his family might have forgiven it ten times over,
and still they would be in disgrace through him. That is the way I
loo