“Mother,” answered Richard, “was it God or the devil told me I must be neighbour to my own brother and sister? Hasn't my father done them wrong enough that you should side with him and want me to carry on the wrong? I heard the same voice that made you run away with me. You were ready to be hanged for me; I was ready to lose my father for them. He too said I must have done with them, and I told him I wouldn't. That was why I got you to put me on journeyman's wages, uncle. They were starving, and I had nothing to give them. What am I in the world for, if not to set right, so far as I may, what my father has set wrong? You see I _have_ learned something of you, uncle!” “I don't see what,” returned Tuke. He had been listening with a grave face, for he had his pride, and did not relish his nephew's being hand and glove with his base-born brother and sister. “Don't you, father? Where's your socialism? I'm only trying to carry it out.” “Out and away, my boy, as Samson did the gates in my mother's old bible!” answered John. “If a man's socialism don't apply to his own flesh and blood,” resumed Richard, “where on earth is it to begin? Must you hate your own flesh, and go to Russia or China for somebody to be fair to? Ain't your own got as good a right to fair play as any, and ain't they the readiest to begin with? Is it selfish to help your own? It ain't the way you've done by me, uncle!” “You mustn't forget,” said John, “that a grave wrong is done the nation when marriage is treated with disrespect.” “It was my father did that! Was it Alice and Arthur that broke the marriage-law by being born out of wedlock?” “If you treat them like other people, you slight that law.” “If sir Wilton Lestrange were to come into the room this minute, you would offer him a chair; his children you would order out of the house!” “I wouldn't do that,” said Mrs. Tuke. “Mother, you turned them out of the house!--I beg your pardon, mother, but you know it was the same thing! You visited the sins of the father on the children!” “Bravo!” cried his uncle; “I thought you couldn't mean the rot!” “What rot, father?” “That rot about God you flung at me first thing.” “Father, it would take the life out of me to believe there was no God; but the God I hope in is a very different person from the God my mother's clergy have taught her to believe in. Father, do you know Jesus Christ!” “I know the person you mean, my boy.”