This had touched her to the quick, and she had wept softly, stroking her father’s cheek. "Can’t you--couldn’t you--" he began. "Do you think you could talk to him, Bess?" "I’ll try," she said, and just then her brother had come into the room, rosy and happy and unsuspecting, and their confidences were at an end. Ward did not realize, of course, that in asking Elizabeth to speak to Dick he was laying a heavy burden on her. She had promised her father in a kind of pity for him, a pity which sprang from her great love; but as she thought it over, wondering what she was to say, the ordeal grew greater and greater--greater than any she had ever had to encounter. For several days she was spared the necessity of redeeming her promise, for Dick was so little at home, and fortunately, as Elizabeth felt, when he was there the circumstances were not propitious. Then she kept putting it off, and putting it off; and the days went by. Her father had not recurred to the subject; having once opened his heart, he seemed suddenly to have closed it, even against her. His attitude was such that she felt she could not talk the matter over with him; if she could she might have asked him to give her back her promise. She could not talk it over with her mother, and she longed to talk it over with some one. One evening she had an impulse to tell Marriott about it. She knew that he could sympathize with her, and, what was more, she knew that he could sympathize with Dick, whereas she could not sympathize with Dick at all. Though she laughed, and sang, and read, and talked, and drove, and lived her customary life, the subject was always in her thoughts. Finally she discovered that she was adopting little subterfuges in order to evade it, and she became disgusted with herself. She had morbid fears that her character would give way under the strain. At night she lay awake waiting, as she knew her father must be waiting, for the ratchet of Dick’s key in the night-latch. In the many different ways she imagined herself approaching the subject with Dick, in the many different conversations she planned, she always found herself facing an impenetrable barrier--she did not know with what she was to reproach him, with what wrong she was to charge him. She conceived of the whole affair, as the Anglo-Saxon mind feels it must always deal with wrong, in the forensic form--indictment, trial, judgment, execution. But after all, what had Dick done? As she saw him coming and going through the house, at the table, or elsewhere, he was still the same Dick--and this perplexed her; for, looking at him through the medium of her talk with her father, Dick seemed to be something else than her brother; he seemed to have changed into something bad. Thus his misdeeds magnified themselves to her mind, and she thought of them instead of him, of the sin instead of the sinner.