“I don’t understand metaphysics.”

“I am not aware that I am talking metaphysics.  I can imagine that if the present occasion be taken rightly, and used well, all that is good in her may be raised to a height unmeasured but by God; while all that is evil and dark may, by His blessing, fade and disappear in the pure light of her child’s presence.—­Oh, Father! listen to my prayer, that her redemption may date from this time.  Help us to speak to her in the loving spirit of thy Holy Son!”

The tears were full in his eyes; he almost trembled in his earnestness.  He was faint with the strong power of his own conviction, and with his inability to move his sister.  But she was shaken.  She sat very still for a quarter of an hour or more while he leaned back, exhausted by his own feelings.

“The poor child!” said she at length—­“the poor, poor child! what it will have to struggle through and endure!  Do you remember Thomas Wilkins, and the way he threw the registry of his birth and baptism back in your face?  Why, he would not have the situation; he went to sea, and was drowned, rather than present the record of his shame.”

“I do remember it all.  It has often haunted me.  She must strengthen her child to look to God, rather than to man’s opinion.  It will be the discipline, the penance, she has incurred.  She must teach it to be (humanly speaking) self-dependent.”

“But after all,” said Miss Benson (for she had known and esteemed poor Thomas Wilkins, and had mourned over his untimely death, and the recollection thereof softened her)—­“after all, it might be concealed.  The very child need never know its illegitimacy.”

“How?” asked her brother.

“Why—­we know so little about her yet; but in that letter, it said she had no friends;—­now, could she not go into quite a fresh place, and be passed off as a widow?”

Ah, tempter! unconscious tempter!  Here was a way of evading the trials for the poor little unborn child, of which Mr. Benson had never thought.  It was the decision—­the pivot, on which the fate of years moved; and he turned it the wrong way.  But it was not for his own sake.  For himself, he was brave enough to tell the truth; for the little helpless baby, about to enter a cruel, biting world, he was tempted to evade the difficulty.  He forgot what he had just said, of the discipline and the penance to the mother consisting in strengthening her child to meet, trustfully and bravely, the consequences of her own weakness.  He remembered more clearly the wild fierceness, the Cain-like look, of Thomas Wilkins, as the obnoxious word in the baptismal registry told him that he must go forth branded into the world, with his hand against every man’s, and every man’s against him.

“How could it be managed, Faith?”

“Nay, I must know much more, which she alone can tell us, before I can see how it is to be managed.  It is certainly the best plan.”