Ellen shook her head.  The look of gloom which seemed to Breckon habitual in it came back into her face, and he had a fantastic temptation to see how far he could go with her sad consciousness before she should be aware that he was experimenting upon it.  He put this temptation from him, and was in the enjoyment of a comfortable self-righteousness when it returned in twofold power upon him with the coming of some cutlets which capriciously varied the repast.

“Ah, now, Miss Kenton, if you were to take pity on my helplessness!”

“Why, certainly!” She possessed herself of his plate, and began to cut up the meat for him.  “Am I making the bites too small?” she asked, with an upward glance at him.

“Well, I don’t know.  Should you think so?” he returned, with a smile that out-measured the morsels on the plate before her.

She met his laughing eyes with eyes that questioned his honesty, at first sadly, and then indignantly.  She dropped the knife and fork upon the plate and rose.

“Oh, Miss Kenton!” he penitently entreated.

But she was down the slanting aisle and out of the reeling door before he could decide what to do.

XI.

It seemed to Breckon that he had passed through one of those accessions of temperament, one of those crises of natural man, to put it in the terms of an older theology than he professed, that might justify him in recurring to his original sense of his unfitness for his sacred calling, as he would hardly ham called it:  He had allowed his levity to get the better of his sympathy, and his love of teasing to overpower that love of helping which seemed to him his chief right and reason for being a minister:  To play a sort of poor practical joke upon that melancholy girl (who was also so attractive) was not merely unbecoming to him as a minister; it was cruel; it was vulgar; it was ungentlemanly.  He could not say less than ungentlemanly, for that seemed to give him the only pang that did him any good.  Her absolute sincerity had made her such an easy prey that he ought to have shrunk from the shabby temptation in abhorrence.

It is the privilege of a woman, whether she wills it or not, to put a man who is in the wrong concerning her much further in the wrong than he could be from his offence.  Breckon did not know whether he was suffering more or less because he was suffering quite hopelessly, but he was sure that he was suffering justly, and he was rather glad, if anything, that he must go on suffering.  His first impulse had been to go at once to Judge Kenton and own his wrong, and take the consequences—­in fact, invite them.  But Breckon forbore for two reasons:  one, that he had already appeared before the judge with the confession of having possibly made an unclerical joke to his younger daughter; the other, that the judge might not consider levity towards the elder so venial; and though Breckon wished to be both punished and pardoned, in the final analysis, perhaps, he most wished to be pardoned.  Without pardon he could see no way to repair the wrong he had done.  Perhaps he wished even to retrieve himself in the girl’s eyes, or wished for the chance of trying.