"Just think," he said, "what it would be to have you coming home to go out again straight from one of these kennels of the small-pox! The idea is horrible! Wherever you were suspected of being present, the house would be shunned like the gates of death." "In such circumstances I should not go out." "The suspicion of it would be enough. And in your absence, as certainly as in your presence, though not so fatally, you would be neglecting your duty to society." "Then," said Hester, "the portion of society that is healthy, wealthy, and--merry, has stronger claims than the portion that is poor and sick and in prison!" Lord Gartley was for a moment bewildered--not from any feeling of the force of what she said, but from inability to take it in. He had to turn himself about two or three times mentally before he could bring himself to believe she actually meant that those to whom she alluded were to be regarded as a portion of the same society that ruled his life. He thought another moment, then said: "There are the sick in every class: you would have those of your own to visit. Why not leave others to visit those of theirs?" "Then of course you would have no objection to my visiting a duchess in the small-pox?" Lord Gartley was on the point of saying that duchesses never took the smallpox, but he did not, afraid Hester might know to the contrary. "There could be no occasion for that," he said. "She would have everything she could want." "And the others are in lack of everything! To desert them would be to desert the Lord. He will count it so." "Well, certainly," said his lordship, returning on the track, "there would be less objection in the case of the duchess, in as much as every possible precaution would in her house be taken against the spread of the disease. It would be horribly selfish to think only of the person affected!" "You show the more need that the poor should not be deserted of the rich in their bitter necessity! Who among them is able to take the right precautions against the spread of the disease? And if it spread among them, there is no security against its reaching those at last who take every possible care of themselves and none of their neighbours. You do not imagine, because I trust in God, and do not fear what the small-pox can do to me, I would therefore neglect any necessary preventive! That would be to tempt God: means as well as results are his. They are a way of giving us a share in his work." "If I should have imagined such neglect possible, would not yesterday go far to justify me?" said lord Gartley. "You are ungenerous," returned Hester. "You know I was then taken unprepared! The smallpox had but just appeared--at least I had not heard of it before." "Then you mean to give up society for the sake of nursing the poor?" "Only upon occasion, when there should be a necessity--such as an outbreak of infectious disease."