"He shall not stay on any ground of mine; my mind is made up, sir. Infamous man!--did he not have a wife as virtuous and beautiful now, as when I first gave her away at your altar?--It was the sheerest and most gratuitous profligacy." The clergyman mournfully and assentingly moved his head. "Such men," continued the lady, flushing with the sincerest indignation--"are to my way of thinking more detestable than murderers." "That is being a little hard upon them, my dear Madam," said Mr. Falsgrave, mildly. "Do you not think so, Pierre"--now, said the lady, turning earnestly upon her son--"is not the man, who has sinned like that Ned, worse than a murderer? Has he not sacrificed one woman completely, and given infamy to another--to both of them--for their portion. If his own legitimate boy should now hate him, I could hardly blame him." "My dear Madam," said the clergyman, whose eyes having followed Mrs. Glendinning's to her son's countenance, and marking a strange trepidation there, had thus far been earnestly scrutinizing Pierre's not wholly repressible emotion;--"My dear Madam," he said, slightly bending over his stately episcopal-looking person--"Virtue has, perhaps, an over-ardent champion in you; you grow too warm; but Mr. Glendinning, here, he seems to grow too cold. Pray, favor us with your views, Mr. Glendinning?" "I will not think now of the man," said Pierre, slowly, and looking away from both his auditors--"let us speak of Delly and her infant--she has, or had one, I have loosely heard;--their case is miserable indeed." "The mother deserves it," said the lady, inflexibly--"and the child--Reverend sir, what are the words of the Bible?" "'The sins of the father shall be visited upon the children to the third generation,'" said Mr. Falsgrave, with some slight reluctance in his tones. "But Madam, that does not mean, that the community is in any way to take the infamy of the children into their own voluntary hands, as the conscious delegated stewards of God's inscrutable dispensations. Because it is declared that the infamous consequences of sin shall be hereditary, it does not follow that our personal and active loathing of sin, should descend from the sinful sinner to his sinless child." "I understand you, sir," said Mrs. Glendinning, coloring slightly, "you think me too censorious. But if we entirely forget the parentage of the child, and every way receive the child as we would any other, feel for it in all respects the same, and attach no sign of ignominy to it--how then is the Bible dispensation to be fulfilled? Do we not then put ourselves in the way of its fulfilment, and is that wholly free from impiety?" Here it was the clergyman's turn to color a little, and there was a just perceptible tremor of the under lip.