"The one weak spot!" he repeated bitterly. "Shall I tell you what you are, you women who live cheerfully with the men you sell yourselves to, and defy the laws of God and the teaching of the Bible? You're just wastrels and Jezebels. Ay, and there's the garden gate, Marcia, and my heart's as hard as a flint, even though the tears are in your eyes and you look at me as your mother used to look. It's no such tears as you're shedding as'll bring you back into my heart. Your very prosperity's an offence. You carry the price of your shame on your back and in your smooth speech and in this false likeness of yours to the world you don't belong to. If it's duty that's brought you here, you'd better not have come." Marcia rose to her feet. "You're very hard, father," she said simply. [Illustration: "You're very hard, father," she said simply.] "The ways of the transgressors are hard," he replied, pointing still towards the gate. "If you'd come here in shame and humiliation, if you'd come here as one as had learnt the truth, you'd have found me all that you sought. But you come here a very ignorant woman, Marcia, and you leave me a little harder than ever before, and you leave the curses that choke my throat a little hotter, a little more murderous." His clenched fist was pointing towards Mandeleys, his face was like granite. Marcia turned and left him without a word, opened the gate, walked across the little strip of turf, and half shrank from, half clung to the hand which helped her up into the car. "Get away quickly, please," she implored him. "Don't talk to me, James. Outside the gates as quickly as you can go!" He started his engine, and they drove off, through the lodge gates into the country lane, where the hedges were beautiful with fresh green foliage and fragrant with early honeysuckle. "To London," she begged. "Don't stop--anywhere yet." He nodded and drove a little faster, his eyes always upon the road. It was not until they had reached the heath country and the great open spaces around Newmarket that a little colour came back into her cheeks. "It wasn't a success, James," she said quietly. "I was afraid it mightn't be," he admitted. "Nothing but a Drury Lane heroine would have moved him," she went on, with an uneasy little laugh. "If I could have gone back in rags, in a snowstorm, with a child in my arms, he'd have forgiven me. As I am now, I am an offence to all that he holds right, and his ideas are like steel cables--you can't twist or bend them." Borden nodded. He relaxed his speed a little and glanced towards his companion. "You know what our friend said in that Russian manuscript I lent you," he reminded her: "'The primitive laws are for the primitive world.'"