upon
me?'

I answered her with a gaze alone; and she tucked up her clothes and
followed me because the road was dirty. Then I opened the door just wide
enough for the child to to go her father, and left those two to have it
out, as might be most natural. And they took a long time about it.

Meanwhile I needs must go and tell my Lorna all the matter; and her joy
was almost as great as if she herself had found a father. And the
wonder of the whole was this, that I got all the credit; of which not
a thousandth part belonged by right and reason to me. Yet so it almost
always is. If I work for good desert, and slave, and lie awake at night,
and spend my unborn life in dreams, not a blink, nor wink, nor inkling
of my labour ever tells. It would have been better to leave unburned,
and to keep undevoured, the fuel and the food of life. But if I have
laboured not, only acted by some impulse, whim, caprice, or anything;
or even acting not at all, only letting things float by; piled upon me
commendations, bravoes, and applauses, almost work me up to tempt once
again (though sick of it) the ill luck of deserving.

Without intending any harm, and meaning only good indeed, I had now done
serious wrong to Uncle Reuben's prospects. For Captain Carfax was full
as angry at the trick played on him as he was happy in discovering the
falsehood and the fraud of it. Nor could I help agreeing with him, when
he told me all of it, as with tears in his eyes he did, and ready to be
my slave henceforth; I could not forbear from owning that it was a low
and heartless trick, unworthy of men who had families; and the recoil
whereof was well deserved, whatever it might end in.

For when this poor man left his daughter, asleep as he supposed, and
having his food, and change of clothes, and Sunday hat to see to, he
meant to return in an hour or so, and settle about her sustenance in
some house of the neighbourhood. But this was the very thing of all
things which the leaders of the enterprise, who had brought him up from
Cornwall, for his noted skill in metals, were determined, whether by
fair means or foul, to stop at the very outset. Secrecy being their main
object, what chance could there be of it, if the miners were allowed to
keep their children in the neighbourhood? Hence, on the plea of feasting
Simon, they kept him drunk for three days and three nights, assuring him
(whenever he had gleams enough to ask for her) that his daughter was as
well a