“Yes; I know that, sir,” said Dan.

“Perhaps,” continued his father, as they swung easily along, shoulder to shoulder, “I may have gone too far in that direction because I was afraid that you might take your mother too seriously in the other—­that you might not understand that she judged you from her nerves and not her convictions.  It’s part of her malady, of her suffering, that her inherited Puritanism clouds her judgment, and makes her see all faults as of one size and equally damning.  I wish you to know that she was not always so, but was once able to distinguish differences in error, and to realise that evil is of ill-will.”

“Yes; I know that,” said Dan.  “She is now—­when she feels well.”

“Harm comes from many things, but evil is of the heart.  I wouldn’t have you condemn yourself too severely for harm that you didn’t intend—­that’s remorse—­that’s insanity; and I wouldn’t have you fall under the condemnation of another’s invalid judgment.”

“Thank you, father,” said Dan.

They had come up to the paddock behind the barn, and they laid their arms on the fence while they looked over at the horses, which were still there.  The beasts, in their rough winter coats, some bedaubed with frozen clots of the mud in which they had been rolling earlier in the afternoon, stood motionless in the thin, keen breeze that crept over the hillside from the March sunset, and blew their manes and tails out toward Dan and his father.  Dan’s pony sent him a gleam of recognition from under his frowsy bangs, but did not stir.

“Bunch looks like a caterpillar,” he said, recalling the time when his father had given him the pony; he was a boy then, and the pony was as much to him, it went through his mind, as Alice had ever been.  Was it all a jest, an irony? he asked himself.

“He’s getting pretty old,” said his father.  “Let’s see:  you were only twelve.”

“Ten,” said Dan.  “We’ve had him thirteen years.”

Some of the horses pricked up their ears at the sound of their voices.  One of them bit another’s neck; the victim threw up his heels and squealed.

Pat called from the stable, “Heigh, you divils!”

“I think he’d better take them in,” said Dan’s father; and he continued, as if it were all the same subject, “I hope you’ll have seen something more of the world before you fall in love the next time.”

“Thank you; there won’t be any next time.  But do you consider the world such a school of morals; then?  I supposed it was a very bad place.”

“We seem to have been all born into it,” said the father.  He lifted his arms from the fence, and Dan mechanically followed him into the stable.  A warm, homely smell of hay and of horses filled the place; a lantern glimmered, a faint blot, in the loft where Pat was pitching some hay forward to the edge of the boards; the naphtha gas weakly flared from the jets beside the harness-room, whence a smell of leather issued and mingled with the other smell.  The simple, earthy wholesomeness of the place appealed to Dan and comforted him.  The hay began to tumble from the loft with a pleasant rustling sound.