She had told him the truth about herself; she had not been ashamed; she would not have been even if she had taken the daffodil.  But her father!  She was ashamed for him with a bitter shame; ashamed of herself and him too, in thought and intention at least they were one, double-dealers.  “Two grubby little people,” as she had seen them long ago when they first stood in company with that man.

“But you don’t know; you have not our temptations.”  She almost spoke aloud, unconsciously addressing the dewy silence as her mind called the man plainly before her.  “You have never wanted money as I wanted it, or wanted things as father wanted them.  Oh, you would despise the things he wanted—­so do I; they are miserable and mean and sordid; you couldn’t want whisky and comfort as he wanted them, but you can’t think how he did!  He would have justified it to himself too; you wouldn’t, couldn’t do that, while we—­we could justify the devil if we tried.  It is not right, any the more for that, I know it is not; it is dishonest and disgraceful, I know that as well as you; but I know how it came about and you—­you can never understand!” Her voice sank away.  That was the great difference between herself and this man; it did not lie in what she did; that was a remedial matter—­but rather in what she knew and felt.  Things that did not exist for him were not only possible but sometimes almost necessary to her and hers.  The gulf between them which had almost seemed bridged in the early summer was suddenly opened again by the day’s work; opened beyond all passage for her—­thief, and daughter of a thief.

She sat on the doorstone looking out with unseeing eyes while the moon rose higher and the light grew so that the belts of shadow melted and the misty land was all silver, a world of dreams, very pure and still.  But neither her dreams nor her thoughts were pure and still; they were full of passion and pain, longing and regret and shame, and yet an underlying hopeless desire that all could be known and understood.

At last she rose and went in.  The pink woolly thing Captain Polkington had bought her lay on the kitchen-table, half out of its paper wrappings, a silly, useless thing.  As her eyes fell on it they grew dim and hot while the colour crept up in her cheek.  Her father had bought it for her; he had thought to please her with the foolish thing; it was like a child’s or a fool’s gift; she hated herself for hating it.  But he had deceived himself into thinking he was generous to make it with his illgotten gains; he had salved conscience with it—­it was a liar’s gift, a self-deceiver’s, a thief’s.  There was no kindness, no generosity in it, and she despised him—­and he was her father!

She picked up the thing, paper and all, and crammed it into the dying fire.  Then suddenly she burst into tears.  The world was all wrong, justice was wrong and suffering was wrong and mankind wrong, all was wrong and inexplicable and pitiful too.