‘I will not dispute with you. Do you expect to be fed with a spoon still? When you were ill I treated you as a patient, not more kindly than I would have treated my deadliest enemy. I acted as duty prompted. There was no one else to take care of you, that was my motive—my only motive.’ ‘When I think of your kindness then, I wish I were sick again.’ ‘A mean and wicked wish. Tired already, I suppose, of doing _honest_ work.’ ‘Miss Barbara,’ he said, ‘pray let me speak.’ ‘Cruel,’—she recurred to what he had said before, without listening to his entreaty, ‘It is you who are cruel coming here—you, with the ugly stain on your life, coming here to hide it in this innocent household. Would it not be cruel in a man with the plague poison in him to steal into a home of harmless women and children, and give them all the pestilence? Had I suspected that you intended making Morwell your retreat and skulking den, I would never have passed my promise to keep silence. I would have taken the hateful evidence of what you are in my hand, and gone to the first constable and bid him arrest you in your bed.’ ‘No,’ said Jasper, ‘you would not have done it. I know you better than you know yourself. Are you lost to all humanity? Surely you feel pity in your gentle bosom, notwithstanding your bitter words.’ ‘No,’ she answered, with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes, ‘no, I have pity only for myself, because I was weak enough to take pains to save your worthless life.’ ‘Miss Jordan,’ he said, looking sorrowfully at her—and her eyes fell—’surely I have a right to ask some pity of you. Have you considered what the temptations must be that beset a young man who has been roughly handled at home, maltreated by his father, reared without love—a young man with a soul bounding with hopes, ambition, love of life, with a heart for pleasure, all which are beaten back and trampled down by the man who ought to direct them? Can you not understand how a lad who has been thwarted in every way, without a mother to soothe him in trouble, and encourage him in good, driven desperate by a father’s harshness, may break away and transgress? Consider the case of one who has been taught that everything beautiful—laughter, delight in music, in art, in nature, a merry gambol, a joyous warble—is sinful; is it not likely that the outlines of right and wrong would be so blurred in his conscience, that he might lapse into crime without criminal intent?’ ‘Are you speaking of yourself, or are you excusing another?’ ‘I am putting a case.’ Barbara sighed involuntarily. Her own father had been unsympathetic. He had never been actually severe, he had been indifferent. ‘I can see that there were temptations to one so situated to leave his home,’ she answered, ‘but this is not a case of truancy, but of crime.’ ‘You judge without knowing the circumstances.’ ‘Then tell me all, that I may form a more equitable judgment.’ ‘I cannot do that now. You shall be told—later.’