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My wife and I looked at each other in a dismay in which a glance from old Hasketh assured us that we had his sympathy. It would have been far simpler if Mrs. Hasketh had been up and down with us as Tedham’s emissaries, and refused to tell us anything of his daughter, and left us to report to him that he must find her for himself if he found her at all. This was what we had both expected, and we had come prepared to take back that answer to Tedham, and discharge our whole duty towards him in its delivery. This change in the woman who had hated him so fiercely, but whose passion had worn itself down to the underlying conscience with the lapse of time, certainly complicated the case. I was silent; my wife said: “I don’t know what I should have done, Mrs. Hasketh;” and Mrs. Hasketh resumed:

“If I did wrong in trying to separate her life from her father’s, I was punished for it, because when I wanted to undo my work, I didn’t know how to begin; I presume that’s the worst of a wrong thing. Well, I never did begin; but now I’ve got to. The time’s come, and I presume it’s as easy now as it ever could be; easier. He’s out and it’s over, as far as the law is concerned; and if she chooses she can see him. I’ll prepare her for it as well as I can, and he can come if she wishes it.”

“Do you mean that he can see her here?” my wife asked.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hasketh, with a sort of strong submission.

“At once? To-day?”

“No,” Mrs. Hasketh faltered. “I didn’t want him to see her just the first day, or before I saw him; and I thought he might try to. She’s visiting at some friends in Providence; but she’ll be back to-morrow. He can come to-morrow night, if she says so. He can come and find out. But if he was anything of a man he wouldn’t want to.”

“I’m afraid,” I ventured, “he isn’t anything of that kind of man.”

VI.

“Now, how unhandsome life is!” I broke out, at one point on our way home, after we had turned the affair over in every light, and then dropped it, and then taken it up again. “It’s so graceless, so tasteless! Why didn’t Tedham die before the expiration of his term and solve all this knotty problem with dignity? Why should he have lived on in this shabby way and come out and wished to see his daughter? If there had been anything dramatic, anything artistic in the man’s nature, he would have renounced the claim his mere paternity gives him on her love, and left word with me that he had gone away and would never be heard of any more. That was the least he could have done. If he had wanted to do the thing heroically–and I wouldn’t have denied him that satisfaction–he would have walked into that pool in the old cockpit and lain down among the autumn leaves on its surface, and made an end of the whole trouble with his own burdensome and worthless existence. That would truly have put an end to the evil he began.”

“I wouldn’t be–impious, Basil,” said my wife, with a moment’s hesitation for the word. Then she sighed and added, “Yes, it seems as if that would be the only thing that could end it. There doesn’t really seem to be any provision in life for ending such things. He will have to go on and make more and more trouble. Poor man! I feel almost as sorry for him as I do for her. I guess he hasn’t expiated his sin yet, as fully as he thinks he has.”

“And then,” I went on, with a strange pleasure I always get out of the poignancy of a despair not my own, “suppose that this isn’t all. Suppose that the girl has met some one who has become interested in her, and whom she will have to tell of this stain upon her name?”