"You are an ignorant, shameless woman," he said. "Get you home and read your Bible. If you want a last word to carry away with you, here it is. My daughter was just as much to me as the young woman who walked yonder with you in the garden is to her father. Let him remember that." "But, you foolish person," she expostulated, "Lady Letitia enjoys all the advantages to which her station entitles her. Your daughter, with a mind and intelligence very much superior to her position, was employed in the miserable drudgery of teaching village children." "Honest work," he replied, "hurts no one, unless they are full of sickly fancies. It's idleness that brings sin. They tell me you've new creeds amongst those in your walk of life, and a new manner of living. Live as you will, then, but let others do the same. I stand by the Book, and maybe, when your last days come, you will be sorry you cast it aside." "So far as I remember," she reminded him, "the chief teaching of that Book is forgiveness." "Your memory fails you, then," he answered grimly, "for what the Book preaches is justice to poor and rich alike." The Duchess sighed. She was a good-hearted woman and full of confidence, but she recognised her limitations. "My good man," she said, "I shall not argue with you any more. You won't believe it, but you are simply narrow and pig-headed and obstinate, and you won't believe that there may be a grain of reason in anybody else's point of view but your own. Just look at yourself! You can't be more than sixty-five or so, and you might be a hundred! You sit there nursing your grievance and thinking about it, while your whole life is running to seed. Why don't you get up and be a human being? Send for your daughter to come down and look after you--she'd come--and choke it all down. Put the Book away for a time, or read a little more of the New Testament and a little less of the Old. Come, will you be sensible, and I'll come in and shake hands with you, and we'll write your daughter together." Vont was still leaning on his stick. Save that his eyebrows were drawn a little closer together, his expression was unchanged. Yet his visitor, though the sunshine was all around them, shivered. "Did he send you here?" "Of course not," she replied. "I came of my own accord. I remembered the days when you used to take me rabbiting and let me shoot a pheasant if there was no one about. You were a sensible, well-balanced man then. I came, hoping to find that there was a little of the old Richard Vont left in you."