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After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with us in the parlor.

My wife began at once to say, “Mr. March has told me why you wanted to see me, Mr. Tedham.”

“Yes,” he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure his cause.

“I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs. Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me.”

Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily, “Won’t you try?”

“Yes,” she answered, most unexpectedly to me, “I will try to see her. But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come from you, and for you.”

“I thought,” Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, “that perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me.”

“No, I couldn’t do that,” my wife said.

He went on as if he had not heard her: “If she did not know that the inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my daughter was with her.”

There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham’s old insinuation, but coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his suggestion in the way I had thought she would.

“No,” she said, “that wouldn’t do. She has kept account of the time, you may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth.”

“I didn’t know,” he returned, “but you might evade the point, somehow. So much being at stake,” he added, as if explaining.

Still my wife was not severe with him. “I don’t understand, quite,” she said.

“Being the turning-point in my life, I can’t begin to do anything, to be anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don’t know where to find myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that.”

“But, of course, there is another point of view.”

“My daughter’s?”

“Mrs. Hasketh’s.”

“I don’t care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the child’s sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time–the only thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to.”

He continued: “I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is no sense in the whole thing, if I haven’t. They might as well have let me go in the beginning. Don’t you think that ten years out of my life is enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could condone–“

“Oh, you mustn’t reason from us,” my wife broke in. “We are very silly people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have got to reckon with the world at large.”

“I have reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the reckoning. But why shouldn’t my daughter look at this thing as you do?”

Instead of answering, my wife asked, “When did you hear from her last?”