"And now, when what we agreed to do together has turned out better than either of us could have hoped for, when we are very nearly at the end of it, and can send Harry out into the world what we have made of him here, you want to break the bargain. And why? Not for any good it can possibly do him, but just because you want to go back to what you were before you came here—for your own petty selfish pleasure." "It isn’t that," she said vehemently. "I say it isn’t natural that anybody should cut themselves off from their own flesh and blood. I loved my father and he died without me setting eyes on him. You let me write to mother then. I didn’t do it without asking you, and——" "Didn’t we strike the bargain afresh then? Didn’t I say I was sorry that it should have been required of you to cut yourself off from your family, but that it had already then proved to be the right course? And didn’t you agree with me, though it was harder for you to bear then than at any time?" The tears came. "Of course it was hard, then," she said. "But you were kind to me. So you were when I first came. If I was giving up something, I was going to get something too. All that I’d been was to be forgotten, though it isn’t true that I’d been anything that I ought not to have been. Harry was to grow up knowing me as belonging here. You were to be his legal guardian, but he was to be my child." "Yes, and I might have struck a much harder bargain with you than that. You would have consented. I might have taken the child and paid you off. That’s often done, you know, in cases like yours." She was sobbing now. "You’re cruel," she said. "Yes, you are cruel, even when you’re pretending to be nice. You like hurting me. Pay me off! Anybody’d think, to hear you talk, I’d been a loose woman." "I’ve never said that, or implied it." "No, you’ve never said it. You wouldn’t dare. But you’ve made me feel that’s how you look at me. Why didn’t you pay me off, then, and get rid of me?" "Exactly. Why didn’t I?" "Well? I’m asking you." "I was willing to give you your chance. Whatever I may have thought of you, I didn’t want to deprive you of your child, or him of his mother, so long as you were ready to make yourself the kind of mother he ought to have had. You said you’d do it. You were grateful to me. You consented to every stipulation I laid down. The chief of them all was that you should break absolutely with your past until he came of age. Then you could do what you liked; it would be between you and him. Now you want to break that stipulation. I say that if you break it on one side you break it on the other; I also say that it would be a very wicked thing to break it, now at this time." "It wouldn’t be if you’d just let me go away for a bit and come back."