Keziah by this time had mastered her tears. She had dried the spot carefully and tenderly with a handkerchief, pressing the muslin between two folds. ‘Miss Anne,’ she said, ‘don’t you say as I’m cheating, or my heart will break. That is one thing nobody can say of me. I tell him honest that I can’t abide him, and if he will have me after that, is it my fault? No, it’s not that,’ she said shaking her head with the melancholy gravity of superior experience: ‘I wasn’t thinking just of what I’d like. You ladies do what you please, and when you’re crossed, you think the world is coming to an end; but in our class of life, you’re brought up to know as you can’t have your own way.’ ‘It is not a question of having your own way. How could you marry a man you did not--love?’ cried Anne, full of wrath and indignation, yet with awe of the sacred word she used. Was it too fine a word to be used to little Keziah? The girl gazed at her for a moment, half-roused, half-wondering; then shook her head again. ‘Oh, Miss Anne, _love_! a girl couldn’t love an old man like that; and he don’t look for it, aunt says. And he’d think a deal of me, more than--than others might. It’s better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave. And he’s got plenty of money--I don’t know how much--in the bank; and mother and all of us so poor. He would leave it to me, every penny. You can’t just hear that, Miss Anne, can you, and take no notice? There’s a deal to be said for him, I don’t deny it; and if it was only not being fond of him, I shouldn’t mind that.’ ‘Then you must not ask me to be sorry for you,’ said Anne, with stern severity, ‘if you could sell yourself for money, Keziah! But, no, no, you could not do it, it is not possible--you, a girl just my age, and brought up with me. You could not do it, Keziah. You have lived here with me almost all your life.’ ‘Miss Anne, you don’t understand. You’ve been used to having your own way; but the like of us don’t get our own way. And aunt says many a lady does it and never minds. It’s not that,’ said Keziah, with a fresh outburst of tears. ‘I hope as I could do my duty by a man whether I was fond of him or whether I wasn’t. No, it isn’t that: it’s--it’s the other one, Miss Anne.’ And here the little girl hid her face in her hands and sobbed; while Anne, her sternness melting in spite of herself, stood looking on with the face of the recording angel, horrified by this new admission and reluctant to write it down. ‘Is there--another?’ she asked in a whisper of horror. Keziah uncovered her face; the tone in which she was addressed curdled her blood; she turned her white, little, tear-stained countenance to her mistress with an appalled look of guilt. She had not understood before, poor little girl, how guilty she was. She had not known that it was guilt at all. She was herself standing at the bar, a poor little tremulous criminal in the blaze of Anne’s indignant eyes.