and comfort as he wanted them, but you can't
think how he did! He would have justified it to himself too; you
wouldn't, couldn't do that, while we--we could justify the devil if we
tried. It is not right, any the more for that, I know it is not; it is
dishonest and disgraceful, I know that as well as you; but I know how
it came about and you--you can never understand!" Her voice sank away.
That was the great difference between herself and this man; it did not
lie in what she did; that was a remedial matter--but rather in what
she knew and felt. Things that did not exist for him were not only
possible but sometimes almost necessary to her and hers. The gulf
between them which had almost seemed bridged in the early summer was
suddenly opened again by the day's work; opened beyond all passage for
her--thief, and daughter of a thief.

She sat on the doorstone looking out with unseeing eyes while the moon
rose higher and the light grew so that the belts of shadow melted and
the misty land was all silver, a world of dreams, very pure and still.
But neither her dreams nor her thoughts were pure and still; they were
full of passion and pain, longing and regret and shame, and yet an
underlying hopeless desire that all could be known and understood.

At last she rose and went in. The pink woolly thing Captain
Polkington had bought her lay on the kitchen-table, half out of its
paper wrappings, a silly, useless thing. As her eyes fell on it they
grew dim and hot while the colour crept up in her cheek. Her father
had bought it for her; he had thought to please her with the foolish
thing; it was like a child's or a fool's gift; she hated herself for
hating it. But he had deceived himself into thinking he was generous
to make it with his illgotten gains; he had salved conscience with
it--it was a liar's gift, a self-deceiver's, a thief's. There was no
kindness, no generosity in it, and she despised him--and he was her
father!

She picked up the thing, paper and all, and crammed it into the dying
fire. Then suddenly she burst into tears. The world was all wrong,
justice was wrong and suffering was wrong and mankind wrong, all was
wrong and inexplicable and pitiful too.

For a minute she sobbed chokingly, then she forced back the tears with
the angry impatience of a hurt animal, and fetching a sheet of paper
and pencil, sat down to write. He was her father and he was a man with
a warped idea of honour, one whose self-respect had bee