Mary Gordon had been seated upon a wall which jutted out over the water. She leaped to her feet in an instant and caught me by the wrist, looking with an eager and passionate regard into my eyes. “You must not--you shall not!” she cried. “My father is not to be spoken to. He is not himself. He has sworn that he will answer no man, speak to no man, have dealings with no man, till the shame be staunched and his innocency made to appear.” “But I will bring him to himself,” I said, “I will reason with him, and that most tenderly.” “Nay,” she said, taking me eagerly by the breast of my coat, “I tell you he will not listen to a word.” “It is my duty,” I answered. “Wherefore?” she cried, sharply. “You are not his minister.” “No,” said I, “but I am more. I am both his friend and yours.” “Do you mean to reprove him?” she asked. “It is my duty--in part,” said I, for the thought of mine office had come upon me, and I feared that for this girl’s sake I might even be ready ignominiously to demit and decline my plain duty. “For that wherein he has given the unrighteous cause to speak reproachfully, I will reprove him,” I said. “For the rest, I will aid, support, and succour him in all that one man may do to another. By confession of his fault, such as it has been, he may yet keep the Cause from being spoken against.” “Ah, you do not know my father, to speak thus of him,” Mary Gordon cried, clasping her hands. “When he is in his fury he cares for neither man nor beast. He might do you a hurt, even to the touching of your life. Ah, do not go to him.” (Here she clasped her hands, and looked at me with such sweet, petitionary graciousness that my heart became as wax within me.) “Let him come to himself. What are reproof and hard words, besides the shame that comes when such a man as my father sits face to face with the sins of his own heart?” Almost I had given way, but the thought of the dread excommunication, and the danger which his children must also incur, compelled me. “Hear me, Mary,” I said, “I must speak to him. For all our sakes--yours as well--I must go instantly to Alexander Gordon.” She waved her hand impatiently. “Do not go,” she said. “Can you not trust me? I thought you--you once told me that you loved me. And if you had loved me, I do not know, I might----” She paused. A wild hope--warm, tender, gloriously insurgent, rose-coloured--welled up triumphantly in my heart. My blood hummed in my ears. “She would love me; she would give herself to me. I cannot offend her. This alone is my happiness. This only is life. What matters all else?” And I was about to give way. If I had so much as looked in her face, or met her eyes, I must have fallen from my intent. But I called to mind the path by which I had been led, the oath that had been laid upon me to speak faithfully. The lonely way of a man--a sinful man trying to do the right--gripped me like a vice, and compelled me against my will.