"You should have seen his face; you should have heard his voice; you should have seen him squirming and twisting in his chair as though this was the very roots of him coming up out of him and hurting him. And I tell you, old man, it was the very roots of him. It was his creed, it was his religion, it was his composition; it was the whole nature and basis and foundation of the man as it had been storing up within him all his life, ever since he was the rummy, thoughtful sort of beggar he used to be as a kid at old Wickamote's thirty years ago. It got me, I can tell you. It made me feel funny. Yes, and the next thing he went on to was equally the blood and bones of him. In a way even more characteristic. He said, 'Mind you, Hapgood, I don't blame my wife that all this had no effect on her. I don't blame her in the least, and I never lost my temper or got angry over the business. I see her point of view absolutely. And I see absolutely the point of view of the girl's father and of every one else who's willing to take in the girl but insists she must give up the baby. I see their point of view and understand it as plain as I see and understand that calendar hanging on the wall. I see it perfectly,' and he laughed in a whimsical sort of way and said, 'That's the devil of it.' "Characteristic, eh? Wasn't that just exactly old Sabre at school puzzling up his old nut and saying, 'Yes, but I see what he means'? "Well, wait a bit. He came to that again afterwards. It seems that, if you please, the very next day the girl herself follows up her letter by walking into the house. Eh? Yes, you can well say 'By Jove.' In she walked, baby and all. She'd walked all the way from Tidborough, and God knows how far earlier in the day. Sabre said she was half dead. She'd been to her father's house, and her father, that terrific-looking old Moses coming down the mountain that I've described to you, had turned her out. He'd take her--he had cried over her, the poor crying creature said--if she'd send away her baby, also if she'd say who the father was, but she wouldn't. 'I can't let my little baby go,' she said. Sabre said it was awful, hearing her. And so he drove her out, the old Moses man did, and the poor soul tried around for a bit--no money--and then trailed out to them. "Sabre wouldn't tell me all that happened between his wife and himself. I gather that, in his quiet way, perfectly seeing his wife's point of view and genuinely deeply distressed at the frightful pitch things were coming to, in that sort of way he nevertheless got his back up against his sense of what he ought to do and said the girl was not to be sent away, that she was to stop. "His wife said, 'You're determined?' "He said, 'Mabel' (that's her name) 'Mabel, I'm desperately, poignantly sorry, but I'm absolutely determined.'