"I've got a lot of things to say to you." Lydia glanced up at him with that wonderful, exasperating look, half humility, and waited. It seemed to her he must have a great deal to say. "I don't believe it's possible for you--for a girl--to understand what it would be for a man in my place to come home and find everybody so sweet and kind. I mean you--and Anne." Now he felt nothing short of shame. But she took him quickly enough. He didn't have to go far along the shameful road. She glanced round at him again, and, knowing what the look must be, he did not meet it. He could fancy well the hurt inquiry leaping into those innocent eyes. "What have I done," she asked, and his mind supplied the accusatory inference, "that you don't love me any more?" He hastened to answer. "You've been everything that's sweet and kind." He added, whether wisely or not he could not tell, what seemed to him the truth: "I haven't got hold of myself. I thought it would be an easy stunt to come back and stay a while and then go away and get into something permanent. But it's no such thing. Lydia, I don't understand people very well. I don't understand myself. I'm afraid I'm a kind of blackguard." "Oh, no," said Lydia gravely. "You're not that." She did not understand him, but she was, in her beautiful confidence, sure he was right. She was hurt. There was the wound in her heart, and that new sensation of its actually bleeding; but she had a fine courge of her own, and she knew grief over that inexplicable pang must be put away until the sight of it could not trouble him. "I'm going to ask you a question," said Jeffrey shortly, in his distaste for asking it at all. "Do you want me to take father away with me, you and Anne?" "Are you going away?" she asked, in an irrepressible tremor. "Answer me," said Jeffrey. She was not merely the beautiful child he had thought her. There was something dauntless in her, something that could endure. He felt for her a quick passion of comradeship and the worship men have for women who seem to them entirely beautiful and precious enough to be saved from disillusion. "If I took him away with me--and of course it would be made possible," he was blundering over this in decency--"possible for you to live in comfort--wouldn't you and Anne like to have some life of your own? You haven't had any. Like other girls, I mean." She threw her own question back to him with a cool and clear decision he hadn't known the soft, childish creature had it in her to frame. "Does he want us to go?" "Good God, no!" said Jeffrey, faced, in the instant, by the hideous image of ingratitude she conjured up, his own as well as his father's. "Do you?" "Lydia," said he, "you don't understand. I told you you couldn't. It's only that my sentence wasn't over when I left prison. It's got to last, because I was in prison." "Oh, no! no!" she cried.