“As for Annie, I don’t know how much she has grown to care for him; I’m afraid she’s known about our talks, and lotted on ’em, though if anything has passed between them she would have told me. For she’s a good girl--a _good_ girl--and she’ll stand by me, never fear, and say as I say now, that it’s good riddance! D’ye mind? Good riddance to bad rubbish--to your whole miserable, conniving, underhanded family! There ain’t an honest hair in your head, Lemuel Fairchild, and there never was. And you can go back to them that sent you, to your old catamaran of a sister and your young sneak of a son, and tell ’em what I think of them, and you, and the whole caboodle of you, that ruined and killed my Jane, and made me a broken old woman before my time, and now tries to break my grand-daughter’s heart! And the longest day you Jive, don’t ever let me lay eyes on you again. That’s all!” Lemuel groped his way out again through the dark hall, to the front door. The groaning discords from upstairs rose to a triumphant babel of sound as he knocked against the hat-rack, and fumbled for the latch, as if to emphasize and gloat over his discomfiture. The cold evening air, after the sweltering heat of the sick-room, was a physical relief, but it brought no moral comfort. Old Lemuel was much pained, and even more confused, by the hard words to which he had had to listen. They presented a portrait of himself which he felt to be in no way a likeness, yet he could not say wherein a single line should be altered. He knew that he was not a bad man; he felt conscious of having done no special wrong, intentionally, to anybody; he had always tried to be fair and square and easy-going with everybody: yet the mischief of it was that all these evil things which the witchlike M’tildy had piled at his door were of indubitable substance, and he could not prove, even to himself, much less to her, that they did not belong there. It was a part of the consistently vile luck of his life that all these malignant happenings should be charged up against him, and used to demonstrate his wickedness. He had not enough mental skill or alertness to sift the unfair from the true in the indictment she had drawn, or to put himself logically in her place, and thus trace her mistakes. He only realized that all these events which she enumerated had served to convince Mrs. Warren that he was a villain. The idea was a new one to him, and it both surprised and troubled him to find that, as he thought the matter over he could not see where she was particularly wrong. Yet a villain he had certainly never intended to be--never for a moment. Was this not cruelly hard luck?