“Where is she?”

“She has gone for a walk, alone,” she answered.  She had, in truth, packed Hetty off and watched her across the yard before venturing to her husband’s door.

“So best.”  He dropped back in his chair with a sigh that was more than half composed of relief.  “So best, perhaps.  I will speak to her later.”

He looked at his wife with hopeless inquiry.  She bowed her head for sign that it was indeed hopeless.

Now Molly had sought her mother early and spoken up.  But Molly (who intended nothing so little) had not only made herself felt, for the first time in her life, as a person to be reckoned with, but had also done the most fatally foolish thing in her life by winding up with:  “And we—­you and father and all of us, but father especially—­have driven her to it!  God knows to what you will drive her yet:  for she has taken an oath under heaven to marry the first man who offers, and she is capable of it, if you will not be sensible.”

—­Which was just the last thing Hetty would have forbidden her to tell, yet just the last thing Hetty would have told, had she been pleading for Molly.  For Hetty had long since gauged her mother and knew that, while her instinct for her sons’ interests was well-nigh impeccable, on any question that concerned her daughters she would blunder nine times out of ten.

So now Mrs. Wesley, meaning no harm and foreseeing none, answered her husband gravely, “She has told me nothing.  But she swears she will marry the first man who offers.”

The Rector shut his mouth firmly.  “That decides it,” he answered.  “Has she gone in search of the fool?”

But this was merely a cry of bitterness.  As Mrs. Wesley stole from the room, he opened a drawer in his table, pulled out some sheets of manuscript, and gazed at them for a while without fixing his thoughts.  He seldom considered his daughters.  Women had their place in the world:  that place was to obey and bear children:  to carry on the line for men.  It was a father’s duty to take care that their husbands should be good men, worthy of the admixture of good blood.  The family which yielded its daughters to this office yielded them as its surplus.  They did not carry on its name, which depended on its sons. . . .  He had three sons:  but of all his daughters Hetty had come nearest to claim a son’s esteem.  Something masculine in her mind had encouraged him to teach her Latin and Greek.  It had been an experiment, half seriously undertaken; it had come to be seriously pursued.  Not even John had brought so flexible a sense of language.  In accuracy she could not compare with John, nor in that masculine apprehension which seizes on logic even in the rudiments of grammar.  Mr. Wesley—­a poet himself, though by no means a great one—­had sometimes found John too pragmatical in demanding reasons for this and that.  “Child,” he had once protested, “you think to carry everything