hat miserable
quill-driver if it wasn't for the law, I wouldn't mind if you tore it up
here, now, on this spot. But don't you do it. Unless you should some
day feel that--"

He choked, unexpectedly. She, reflective, hesitated a moment then making
up her mind bravely.

"Neither am I keeping anything back from you."

She had said it! But he in his blind generosity assumed that she was
alluding to her deplorable history and hastened to mutter:

"Of course! Of course! Say no more. I have been lying awake thinking
of it all no end of times."

He made a movement with his other arm as if restraining himself from
shaking an indignant fist at the universe; and she never even attempted
to look at him. His voice sounded strangely, incredibly lifeless in
comparison with these tempestuous accents that in the broad fields, in
the dark garden had seemed to shake the very earth under her weary and
hopeless feet.

She regretted them. Hearing the sigh which escaped her Anthony instead
of shaking his fist at the universe began to pat her hand resting on his
arm and then desisted, suddenly, as though he had burnt himself. Then
after a silence:

"You will have to go by yourself to-morrow. I . . . No, I think I
mustn't come. Better not. What you two will have to say to each other--"

She interrupted him quickly:

"Father is an innocent man. He was cruelly wronged."

"Yes. That's why," Anthony insisted earnestly. "And you are the only
human being that can make it up to him. You alone must reconcile him
with the world if anything can. But of course you shall. You'll have to
find words. Oh you'll know. And then the sight of you, alone, would
soothe--"

"He's the gentlest of men," she interrupted again.

Anthony shook his head. "It would take no end of generosity, no end of
gentleness to forgive such a dead set. For my part I would have liked
better to have been killed and done with at once. It could not have been
worse for you--and I suppose it was of you that he was thinking most
while those infernal lawyers were badgering him in court. Of you. And
now I think of it perhaps the sight of you may bring it all back to him.
All these years, all these years--and you his child left alone in the
world. I would have gone crazy. For even if he had done wrong--"

"But he hasn't," insisted Flora de Barral with a quite unexpected
fierceness. "You mustn't even suppose it. Haven't you read the accounts
of the t