It was a quick blaze of light, wherein he saw that the girl’s spirit was not with him.  He would have stopped the farmer at once, but he had not the heart to do it, even had he felt in himself strength to attract an intelligent response from that strange, grave, bovine fixity of look, over which the human misery sat as a thing not yet taken into the dull brain.

“My taste for life,” the old man resumed, “that’s gone.  I didn’t bargain at set-out to go on fighting agen the world.  It’s too much for a man o’ my years.  Here’s the farm.  Shall ’t go to pieces?—­I’m a farmer of thirty year back—­thirty year back, and more:  I’m about no better’n a farm labourer in our time, which is to-day.  I don’t cost much.  I ask to be fed, and to work for it, and to see my poor bit o’ property safe, as handed to me by my father.  Not for myself, ’t ain’t; though perhaps there’s a bottom of pride there too, as in most things.  Say it’s for the name.  My father seems to demand of me out loud, ‘What ha’ ye done with Queen Anne’s Farm, William?’ and there’s a holler echo in my ears.  Well; God wasn’t merciful to give me a son.  He give me daughters.”

Mr. Fleming bowed his head as to the very weapon of chastisement.

“Daughters!” He bent lower.

His hearers might have imagined his headless address to them to be also without a distinct termination, for he seemed to have ended as abruptly as he had begun; so long was the pause before, with a wearied lifting of his body, he pursued, in a sterner voice: 

“Don’t let none interrupt me.”  His hand was raised as toward where Rhoda stood, but he sent no look with it; the direction was wide of her.

The aspect of the blank blind hand motioning to the wall away from her, smote an awe through her soul that kept her dumb, though his next words were like thrusts of a dagger in her side.

“My first girl—­she’s brought disgrace on this house.  She’s got a mother in heaven, and that mother’s got to blush for her.  My first girl’s gone to harlotry in London.”

It was Scriptural severity of speech.  Robert glanced quick with intense commiseration at Rhoda.  He saw her hands travel upward till they fixed in at her temples with crossed fingers, making the pressure of an iron band for her head, while her lips parted, and her teeth, and cheeks, and eyeballs were all of one whiteness.  Her tragic, even, in and out breathing, where there was no fall of the breast, but the air was taken and given, as it were the square blade of a sharp-edged sword, was dreadful to see.  She had the look of a risen corpse, recalling some one of the bloody ends of life.

The farmer went on,—­

“Bury her!  Now you here know the worst.  There’s my second girl.  She’s got no stain on her; if people ’ll take her for what she is herself.  She’s idle.  But I believe the flesh on her bones she’d wear away for any one that touched her heart.  She’s a temper.  But she’s clean both in body and in spirit, as I believe, and say before my God.  I—­what I’d pray for is, to see this girl safe.  All I have shall go to her.  That is, to the man who will—­won’t be ashamed—­marry her, I mean!”