When breakfast was over and their guests had gone to their rooms to make ready to meet the train, Jane decoyed the captain away to Bruno’s kennel, where he was tied during Mr. Van Ness’s stay.  Once out of sight she retied his cravat, arranged his white hair to her liking, stroked his sunken cheeks.  Here was something actual and real.  She knew now that she had never had anything that was truly her own but the kind foolish face looking down on her.  She never would have anything more.  Only an hour ago life had opened for her wide and fair as the dawn:  now it had narrowed to this old hand in hers, to his breath, that came and went—­O God, how feebly!

“You are looking stronger to-day, father.  You are gaining every day.  Oh that is quite certain!  Very soon we shall have you as well and strong as you were at forty.”

What if she had not had money this last year?  He never could have lived through it.  God had been kind to her—­kind!  She pressed his hand to her breast with a quick glance out to the bright sky.  The Captain saw her chin quivering.  His own thoughts ran partly in the same line as hers.

“Oh, I’m gaining, no doubt of it.  Though I never could have pulled through this year if we had had to live in the old way.  God bless Will Laidley for leaving the money as he did!”

“It was not his to leave otherwise!” she cried indignantly.

“Tut, tut, Jane!  Of course it was his.  By every law.  He could have flung it away where he chose; and he had a perfect right to do it.”

It was not God who had been kind to her, then:  it was only that she had stolen the money?

“Come, Jenny:  we must go back to the house.”

“In a moment, father.  Go on:  I will follow you.”

She walked up and down the tan-bark path for a while.  She was sure of nothing.  Wherever she had done what seemed to her right and natural, she was barred and checked by the world’s laws and experience.  She had brought these starving wretches out of a hell upon earth into this paradise, and even they laughed at her want of wisdom:  the very money which was her own in the sight of God, and which had lengthened her father’s life, ought to be given back to-day to the poor, its rightful owners.  If there was any other cause for her to fight blindly against the narrow matter-of-fact routine which ruled her life, she did not name it even to herself.

Looking toward the house, she saw her father escorting their guests to the gate, where the carriage waited, David resplendent on the box.  The captain walked with a feeble kind of swagger:  his voice came back to her in weak gusts of laughter.  She laid her hand on a tree, glancing about her with a firm sense of possession.  “The property is mine,” she said, “and I’ll keep it as long as he lives, if all the paupers in the United States were starving at the gates!”

CHAPTER XII.