"Certainly," she replied. "I placed it there as a woman's protest
against the injustice of that isolation."

"I deny that it is unjust."

She turned around and waved her hand toward the little gray building.

"The Savior to whom your church is dedicated thought otherwise," she
reminded him. "Do you play at being lords paramount here over the souls
and bodies of your serfs?"

"You judge without knowledge of the facts," he assured her calmly. "The
girl could have lived here happily and been married to a respectable
young man. She chose, instead, a wandering life. She chose, further, to
make it a disreputable one. She broke her mother's heart and soured her
father's latter years. She brought into the world a nameless child."

Louise's footsteps slackened.

"You men," she sighed, "are all alike! You judge only by what happens.
You never look inside. That is why your justice is so different from a
woman's. All that you have told me is very pitiful, but there is another
view of the case which you should consider. Let us sit down upon this
boulder for a few moments. There is something that I should like to say
to you before I go."

They sat upon a ledge of rock. Below them was the house, with its walled
garden and the blossom-laden orchard. Beyond stretched the moorland,
brilliant with patches of yellow gorse, and the hills, blue and melting
in the morning sunlight.

"Don't you men sometimes realize," she continued earnestly, "the many,
many guises in which temptation may come to a woman, especially to the
young girl so far from home? She may be very lonely, and she may care;
and if she cares, it is so hard to refuse the man she loves. The very
sweetness, the very generosity of a woman's nature prompts her to give,
give, give all the time. There are other women, similarly circumstanced,
who think only of themselves, of their own safety and happiness, and
they escape the danger; but are they to be praised and respected, while
she that yields is condemned and cast out? I feel that you are not going
to agree with me, and I do not wish to argue with you; but what I so
passionately object to is the sweeping judgment you make--the sheep on
one side and the goats on the other. That is how man judges; God looks
further. Every case is different. The law by which one should be judged
may be poor justice for another."

She glanced at him almost appealingly, but there was no sign of yielding
in his face.

"Laws," he remind