"Father, I cannot listen to your talking of Mike like that. If it is wrong to make people innocently happy, to make them laugh and forget their troubles, to--to--well, if it's wrong to be Mike--I'm sorry; but, wrong or right, I love him, and nothing will ever make me give him up." Mrs. Mesurier here interrupted, "I told you, James, how it would be. You cannot change young hearts. The times are not the same as when you and I were young; and, though I'm sure I don't want to go against you, I think you are too hard on Esther. Love is love after all--and Mike's one of the best-hearted lads that ever walked." "Thank you, mother," said Esther, impulsively, throwing her arms round her mother's neck, and bursting into tears, "I--I will never give--give--him up." "No, dear, no; now don't distress yourself. It will all come right. Your father doesn't quite understand." And then a great tempest of sobbing came over Esther, and swept her away to her own room. The father and mother turned to each other with some anger. "James, I'm surprised at your distressing the poor child like that to-night; you might have known she would be sensitive, with Mike only gone to-day! You could surely have waited till to-morrow." "I am surprised, Mary, that you can encourage her as you did. You cannot surely uphold the theatre?" "Well, James, I don't know,--there are theatres and theatres, and actors and actors; and there have been some very good men actors after all, and some very bad men ministers, if it comes to that," she added; "and theatre or no theatre, love's love in spite of all the fathers and mothers in the world--" "All right, Mary, I would prefer then that we spoke no more on the matter for this evening," and James Mesurier turned to his diary, to record, along with the state of the weather, and the engagements of the day, the undutiful conduct of Esther, and a painful difference with his wife. Strange, that men who have themselves loved and begotten should thus for a moment imagine that a small social prejudice, or a narrow religious formula, can break the purpose of a young and vigorous passion. Do they realise what it is they are proposing to obstruct? This is love--_love_, my dear sir, at once the mightiest might, and the rightest right in the universe! This is--Niagara--the Atlantic--the power of the stars--and the strength of the tides. It is all the winds of the world, and all the fires of the centre. You surely cannot be serious in asking it to take, in exchange, some obsolete objection against its beloved! CHAPTER XXXIX MIKE AFAR