"Oh, you mustn't reason from us," my wife broke in. "We are very silly people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have got to reckon with the world at large." "I _have_ reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the reckoning. But why shouldn't my daughter look at this thing as you do?" Instead of answering, my wife asked, "When did you hear from her last?" Tedham took a few thin, worn letters from his breast-pocket "There is Mr. March's letter," he said, laying one on his knee. He handed my wife another. She read it, and asked, "May Mr. March see it?" Tedham nodded, and I took the little paper in turn. The letter was written in a child's stiff, awkward hand. It was hardly more than a piteous cry of despairing love. The address was Mrs. Hasketh's, in Somerville, and the date was about three months after Tedham's punishment began. "Is that the last you have heard from her?" I asked. Tedham nodded as he took the letter from me. "But surely you have heard something more about her in all this time?" my wife pursued. "Once from Mrs. Hasketh, to make me promise that I would leave the child to her altogether, and not write to her, or ask to see her. When I went to the cemetery to-day, I did not know but I should find her grave, too." "Well, it is cruel!" cried my wife. "I will go and see Mrs. Hasketh, but--you ought to feel yourself that it's hopeless." "Yes," he admitted. "There isn't much chance unless she should happen to think the same way you do: that I had suffered enough, and that it was time to stop punishing me." My wife looked compassionately at him, and she began with a sympathy that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, "If it were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your daughter were so situated that it would be--disadvantageous to her to have it known that you were her father?" "You mean that I have no right to mend my broken-up life--what there is left of it--by spoiling hers? I have said that to myself. But then, on the other hand, I have had to ask myself whether I had any right to keep her from choosing for herself about it. I sha'n't force myself on her. I expect to leave her free. But if the child cares for me, as she used to, hasn't that love--not mine for her, but hers for me--got some rights too?" His voice sank almost to a hush, and the last word was scarcely more than a breathing. "All I want is to know where she is, and to let her know that I am in the world, and where she can find me. I think she ought to have a chance to decide." "I am afraid Mrs. Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake, _not_ to have the chance," my wife sighed, and she turned her look from Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer.