“Ah, forgive her! you that know nothing of the heart of man. Can she ever give it back? She says herself the Lord will seek my blood at her hands: how much more me, that knows what might have been and never has been because she was not there? But, Helen, let it be now! It may be but the hinder end of life that’s left, but better that than nothing at all. We are not so old yet, neither you nor me. And there’s the fragments that remain--the fragments that remain.” He held out his hands toward her, the face that Lily had thought so dark and forbidding melting in every line, the lowering brows lifted, the fierce eyes softened with moisture. And Helen looked up at him with her own overflowing, and a light as of martyrdom on her face. “Oh, Alick, my father, my father! I cannot leave my father now.” He kicked away a footstool on the carpet with a sudden movement which, to Lily, at first appeared as if he were offering violence to Helen herself. “Your father!” he cried, “the minister that will have no broken man for his daughter nor ill name for his house, that wants the siller of them that come to woo, that would sell you away to that white-faced lad because he has something to the fore and a respectable name! Oh, don’t speak to me of your father, Helen Blythe, him that should be all spirit and that’s all flesh! Confound him and you and all your sleekit ways! In what way is he better than me?” “Man! you will kill her!” cried Lily, springing forward and putting herself between them. “How dare you swear at her, that is far, far too good for you!” But Helen was not horrified, like Lily. She looked at him still, bending her head to the other side. “My father,” she said, “has his faults, like us all. He is a mixture, as you are yourself. I am not angry at what you say. He likes his pleasure as you do, Alick. He is more moderate: he is a minister. He has not, maybe, been tempted like you, but I allow that it is not far different. Perhaps in the sight of God----” But here her voice failed her, suddenly interrupted by something deeper than tears.