But Daphne could not wait for her meaning to sink in. "Uncle John," she interrupted, taking a quick breath of resolution, "I have read somewhere that if a woman is dishonest, deep down, deliberately a hypocrite, she ought to be gently and mercifully killed; a woman not honest had better not be alive. Uncle, I have something to say to you about myself. Gently and mercifully listen to me, for it ought to kill me to say it!" Mr. Withers turned apprehensively, and was startled by the expression of Daphne's face. She was undoubtedly in earnest. He grew quite pale. "Not here, my dear," he entreated; "not now. Let our thoughts be single for this one hour that we shall be alone together. Let it wait for a little, this woeful confession. I think you probably exaggerate your need of it, as young souls are apt to who have not learned to bear the pain of self-knowledge, or self-reproach without knowledge. Let us forget ourselves, and think of our beloved dead." "Uncle, it must be here and now. I cannot go away from this place a liar, as I came. Let me leave it here,--my cowardly, contemptible falsehood,--in this place of your cross. I am longing, like David, for that water they have gone to find, but I will not drink at Pilgrim Station, except with clean lips that have confessed and told you all." Mr. Withers shrank from these unrestrained and to him indecorous statements of feeling; they shocked him almost as much as would the spectacle of Daphne mutilating her beautiful hair, casting dust upon her head, and rending her garments before him. He believed that her trouble of soul was genuine, but his Puritan reserve in matters of conscience, his scholarly taste, his jealousy for the occasion which had brought them to that spot, all combined to make this unrestrained expression of it offensive to him. However, he no longer tried to repress her. "Uncle, you don't believe me," she said; "but you must. I am quite myself." "Except for the prolonged nervous strain you have been suffering; and I am afraid I have not known how to spare you as I might the fatigue, the altitude perhaps, the long journey face to face with these cruel memories. But I will not press it, I will not press it," he concluded hastily, seeing that his words distressed her. "Press it all you can," she said. "I wish you could press it hard enough for me to feel it; but I feel nothing--I am a stone. At this moment," she reiterated, "I have no feeling of any kind but shame for myself that I should be here at all. Oh, if you only knew what I am!" "It is not what you are, it is who you are, that brings you here, Daphne."