"Uncle," he began, "you must never let a single word that I may say seem to you ungrateful, but I beseech you to listen to me. Life is like a great city in which there are many thoroughfares. It is an immense, insoluble problem which no one can understand. You never open another book except your Bible. You have never willingly exchanged speech with any human being since you left here. In America you shunned all company, you lived in the gloomiest of solitudes. This little corner of the earth is all you know of. Perhaps there is more in life even than that Book can teach you." "Marcia talked like this," Richard Vont said quietly. "She spoke of another world, a world for cleverer folk than I. Are you going to try and break my purpose, too?" "I would if I could," David declared fervently. "This man is what his ancestors and his education have made him. He has led a simple, ignorant, and yet in some respects a decent life. He is too narrow to understand any one's point of view except his own. When he took Marcia away, she was the village girl and he the great nobleman. To-day Marcia holds his future in her hands. She is the strong woman, and he is the weak man. She has achieved fame and made friends. She has lived a happy life, she is at the present moment perfectly content. Every promise he made her he has kept. Well, why not let it go at that?" "So you are another poor child who knows all about this wonderful world of which I am so ignorant," Richard Vont said bitterly. "Yet, my lad, I tell you that there's one great truth that none of you can get over, and that is that sin lives, and there is nothing in this world, save atonement, can wash it out." "There's a newer doctrine than that, uncle," David insisted. "You talk with the voice of the black-frocked minister who dangles Hell in front of his congregation. There is something else can clear away sin, and the Book over which you pore, day by day, will teach it you, if you know where to look for it. There's love." "Was it love, then, that brought him down through the darkness to dishonour my daughter?" Vont demanded, with blazing eyes. "It didn't seem like it, but love must have been there," David answered. "Nothing but love could have kept these two people together all this time, each filling a great place in the other's life. I haven't thought of these things much, uncle, but I tell you frankly, I've read the Bible as well as you, and I don't believe in this black ogre of unforgivable sin. If these two started in wrong fashion, they've purified themselves. I hold that it's your duty now to leave them alone. I say that this vengeance you still hanker after is the eye for an eye and limb for a limb of the Old Testament. There has been a greater light in the world since then." "Have you done?" Vont asked, without the slightest change in his tone or expression.