she had well
managed her affairs, snug in the snugness of the horse-leech's
daughters. She had been all for the walled little island,--as she had
heard it called,--the island of the upward bound, where self-propelment
was the test of right or wrong, and a marriage well above her the
touchstone of a girl's sound morality. On this island such as Jack
Dalhousie had no merit. What simpler than to kick him off, and turn away
with your fingers in your ears?...

Improbable people these, no doubt, if you were of those who judged
people by what they did, and never by what they had; hell-cats,
perhaps, if you happened to be a father thus made sonless....

Her abasement now fairly met the portrait of her sketched by a stranger
two hours since; outran what another stranger had said to her, one night
in a summer-house. She looked back over a year, and seemed to see
herself as truly one empty within, a poor little thing; common in her
whole outlook, vulgar in her soul.... Yes, _vulgar_. Let her hug the
hateful word to her bosom. How else could she have been made to feel so
again and again, by an obscure youth who had no power over anybody but
that he had kept his own face turned toward the stars?...

And when Cally's thoughts turned toward this present, struggling to show
beyond doubt that that girl and this were not one, they ran perpetually
into that new cloud of her own weakness which had unrolled above her
to-day, and now spread and blackened over the skies.

And yet she felt that it was not cowardice that tied her hands against
the fainting girls in the bunching-room. Her strung nerves had carried
it all deeper than that. She had spied on her father, found him out in
guilt; he, it seemed, must for years have been leading a double life
that would not bear looking at. How bring herself to confront papa, who
had always been so affectionate and generous to her, with his discovered
secret?...

If she but had some right, even, some standing from which to speak....
And here her new resolve was that when she saw Dr. Vivian at the
Settlement next week, she would consult him directly: now asking him to
say, not that she had no responsibilities about her father's business,
but that she had them in abundance.

But deeper than this, beneath all the flutterings of her mind, there ran
the increasing sense that, whatever the logic of it might be,
responsibility was on her nevertheless: the supreme responsibility put
upon free beings by