The details of the girl's case were known to Prudence. All the secrecy and silence of Miss Agatha's careful guardianship availed little against an inquiring and sympathetic mind and somewhat unusual powers of observation. Prudence at eighteen was not ignorant. To attempt to keep an intelligent person ignorant is to attempt the impossible. Miss Agatha did not shrink from impossible effort: furthermore she confused the terms ignorance and innocence, and in her furtive avoidances contrived to throw a suggestion of indelicacy upon the most simple of elemental things. Many well-meaning persons bring disrepute in this way on things which should be sacred, and utterly confuse the mind in matters of morality with the disastrous result that, bewildered and impatient, the individual not infrequently breaks away from conventional caution and adopts a line of indifference in regard to decent restraints. Life cannot be run on lines of suppression any more successfully than on the broader gauge of a too liberal tolerance. Restraint has to be practised; and it is the right of the individual to be taught to recognise the necessity for this with the encouragement of the practice. Miss Agatha's narrow creed proclaimed that the girl had sinned, and must therefore be thrust forth; Prudence, in her impulsive youth, felt this decree to be ungenerous, and, had she dared, would have championed the sinner's cause before all Wortheton. She did not fear Wortheton, but she was afraid of Agatha--Agatha, who, at the time of Prudence's birth, was older than Prudence's mother, and who had domineered over her mother and herself until the former's death, which sad event occurred when Prudence was five years old. She remembered her mother only dimly, but she hated Miss Agatha on her mother's account as she would not have hated her on her own. The mop of golden curls which, with the wide blue eyes, lent to Prudence's face a guileless and childlike expression, covered a shrewd little brain. It was no strain on the owner's intelligence to discern that Agatha was jealous of her, had been jealous of her mother before her, on account of their father's preference; and it occasioned her much inward satisfaction to reflect that not even Agatha had the power to lessen his love for her: she was the child of his old age and the light of his eyes. "I've half a mind," she said to herself, and rested her dimpled chin on her hands and stared into the shadowy distance, "to tell him about Bessie. If I asked him to interfere and let her remain, he--might." She did not feel very positive on that head; Mr Graynor was after all a male edition of Agatha. Nevertheless, she would at least make her appeal. "I wonder..." she mused, and thought awhile. "I suppose she was very much in love," was the outcome of these reflections. "I wonder what it feels like to be very much in love."